Dark Matter (Star Carrier, Book 5) (32 page)

“How many, Peter?” he asked in German.

The boy shook his head, answering in the same language. “I don’t know, Governor! But many!
Many!
And with weapons!”

“Responding to a call for help from those three, do you think?” Connor asked. “Or did we trigger an alarm when we blew the wall?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Koch said. He was staring toward the southeast, looking for some sign of the approaching threat. “They’re coming . . . and we can’t hold them off, just the three of us.”

“No,” Delgado agreed. He raised his voice, addressing the fleeing civilians. “
Faster
, people,
faster
!”

A tall and muscular man separated from the crowd and approached them. “How can I help?” He was holding a crudely fashioned spear.

“You are . . .?” Connor asked.

“Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Weirton, ma’am. USNS
Intrepid
.”

“Governor?” Connor said. “How about you giving your gun to this man, and you get the hell out of here.”

Delgado hesitated, then shook his head. “No, ma’am. I am responsible for their safety. I will stay.”

“Herr Koch?”

“No, Lieutenant. I was
Wachtmeister
in another life, long ago . . . Pan-European army. Then I retired and emigrated here. I will stay and fight.”

Connor was about to make it an order . . . then changed her mind. There was something about the expression in Delgado’s eyes, in the set of Koch’s jaw. “Care to join us, Gunnery Sergeant?” she said. “Even without a weapon?”

“
Semper fi
, ma’am,” Weirton told her, using the ancient motto of both the U.S. and the USNA Marines. “And there are other Intrepids here who want to fight.”

“Round them up, Gunnery Sergeant. If we can’t give you weapons now, maybe we can take them.”

The Marine gave a wolfish grin. “My thought exactly, Lieutenant.”

She looked at the sharpened point of the Marine’s spear. “How the hell did you people carve these spears, anyway? Were you able to smuggle knives in here?”

“No, ma’am. We tried . . . but . . .” He gestured at his own nakedness. “They didn’t let us keep anything. But there
are
rocks out here. Nothing like flint, unfortunately, but there
are
other kinds of quartz. We experimented, hammering them together, and there were some that flaked off in nice, sharp shards. We also got sparks, and were able to use them to set fires.”

Connor’s eyebrows went up. “I’m impressed, Gunny.”

“Adapt, improvise, overcome.” It was another ancient mantra of the Corps. “Anyway, ma’am, we got enough of those flakes sharp enough that we could whittle with them.” He shook the pole in his hand. “And this stuff is growing all over the south side of this fucking place. We were able to break them off, sharpen them, and harden the points in fire. Never did figure out how to make stone spear points and attach them to the stick . . . but then we only had a couple of weeks to work on it.”

“You were planning a break-out?”

“Abso-damn-lutely! Trouble was, we kept trying to attack individual Grdoch with these things, but their skins were just too tough. Had to wait until you came along with your laser pistol before we could do the bastards some
real
damage. Hey!” He turned, waving at someone in the streaming crowd. “Callahan! Get your ass over here!”

A young man separated from the moving crowd. With his spear and shaggy beard, he was the perfect image of a prehistoric hunter. A woman joined them, also armed. These had been some of the people who’d rushed the armed Grdoch a few minutes before, facing maser fire and horrible deaths in an attempt to kill their foes. It was, Connor thought, nothing short of astonishing.

Minutes passed, with a small but quickly growing group of armed men and women forming a rough perimeter around the opening in the wall. The civilians kept moving through, faster now as the number of people still inside the compound dwindled.

“I feel,” Delgado said after a while, “like Moses at the Red Sea. And the Egyptians are very nearly upon us.”

Connor had to search her in-head for the reference . . . and frowned when she found it. The people she’d interacted with here, Delgado and Fuentes and some of the others, were unusually free in their use of religious terms and expressions. At first, she’d dismissed it as a cultural affectation. Colony worlds far from Earth and the Confederation’s central government, might be expected to be lax in the enforcement of social mandates like the White Covenant. Others, like the handful of colony worlds established by the Islamic Theocracy, had been established in direct opposition to the White Covenant doctrine.

But Fuentes, she remembered, hadn’t been part of this culture.

It was, Connor thought, a good example of what had been called the foxhole mentality: there are no atheists in foxholes. It didn’t mean a particular doctrine or church, but an overall conviction that
someone
had to be in charge in a universe of unreasoning and irrational violence, fear, and chaos. Without God, that universe swiftly became far too large and far too threatening for the human mind to hold; combat—or the nightmare horror of something like the Grdoch—was guaranteed to bring out the religious impulse resident within every human, an impulse that might well define what Humankind really was.

Like most people who’d grown up in the shadow of the White Covenant, Connor felt mildly embarrassed when someone else invoked God . . . but she was more than willing to overlook such social gaffes if it made fearful people less fearful, despondent people hopeful, or broken people able to function.

Besides, she thought as she watched the last of the crowd feeding through the gap in the wall . . . Delgado was right. It
was
an exodus . . . maybe not one with divine help, but it was an exodus from slavery and fear and nightmare all the same.

The last of the former prisoners vanished through the gap. “Okay,” Connor said. “The rest of you start falling back. Out the hole and scatter.”

“Too late,” Weirton said. He gestured with his spear, looking for all the world like a grim-faced Paleolithic hunter. “The bastards are here. . . .”

USNA CVS
America

40 Eridani A System

1615 hours, TFT

“I think that’s it over there,” an electronics technician said, pointing.

“Get in here closer, Anderson,” Gutierrez said. “I can’t see.”

“How’s this, ma’am?”

“Better . . .”

“If we can get power in there at that junction,” Kepner said, “we should be able to get at least partial use of the ship’s netlink.”

“How about the battery for the door?” Gray suggested. “It should be behind that panel over there.”

“Might work,” Gutierrez said. “Conway! Johansson! See if you can get that cover open! Anderson, give them some light!”

The ship’s netlink was essentially a ship-wide Internet run off an auxiliary server. Even with the main power down, it should have remained functioning, but the power surge when the X-ray beam had burned through the main power module had fried several key junctions, despite circuit hardening. With the netlink operational, anyone with the usual military-standard hardware inside their heads could connect with anyone else on the net, with voice communications, up- and downloading files, or using personal secretaries and avatars to share information. If they could get it running again, they should be able to communicate freely with everyone on board
America
.

There’d been seemingly endless minor problems and frustrations. Panels were closed by self-turning screws; you touched the head with a thumb and it would unscrew itself if it was already in place, or screw itself in if it was not. The power, however, came from the ship’s reserve battery power . . . and that had gone with the power surge that had burned out the server connections. The screw heads were designed to use old-fashioned screwdrivers, but there were none of those relics on either bridge.

Vonnegut, however, spotted the centimeter-wide strip of metal trim on Gray’s command seat, and a few minutes’ worth of cursing and hurt fingers got it peeled off. The strip was flat enough that the corner of one end fit inside the screw head slot; it was awkward, but they were able to back the screw out. A few more minutes, and the panel was off.

That gave them access to the door battery, which Macy, a computer/electronics tech, began wiring into the netlink server. She snapped home a final connection, the server purred to life, and Gray felt the inner click, saw the cascade of data, and knew they were back on-line.

It was, he reflected, decidedly old tech . . .
ancient
tech, in fact. For culture with nanotechnology and gavitics it was very nearly on a par with chipped flints and the fire bow. He was fiercely proud, however, of the way his bridge teams had pulled together, improvising, adapting, and finagling to make it work.

“Damage control!” he thought, opening the channel. “This is Admiral Gray. What’s our status?”

“Not good, Admiral,” came the reply. “But help is on the way!”

“What help?”

“Can you download visuals?”

“That’s affirmative.”

“Have a look, sir. . . .”

A window opened in Gray’s mind, and he saw
America
from the outside, a scene relayed in through a battlespace drone, most likely. The carrier had lost perhaps two hundred meters off the ass end of her tail. From the look of it, a missile or high-energy beam had sliced right through the ship’s spine and cut the aft power tap assemblies free. He could see the jettisoned fragment in the distance, tumbling end for end in a sparkling haze of hit plasma and free-floating bits of molten metal from the hull. As he watched, what was left of the power assembly was crumpling in upon itself, folding its ungainly mass into a tighter and tighter space. The rogue singularities—they would no longer be
micro
—were crushing the spine fragment under unimaginable gravity.

“That would have been
us
, Admiral,” the damage control officer told him. “But a fast-thinking fighter jock used a Krait to blow the assembly clear.”

“What about the Grdoch?” he asked. “Are we still under fire?”

“We haven’t been under fire, sir, but I don’t know what’s been happening. We’ve . . . kind of had our hands full, y’know?”

“Understood. What’s the bill?”

“Main taps are gone, of course, and a lot of the secondaries got fried by the power surge. We have crews fighting fires in Sections Red-One through Red-Five, but it looks like we have them contained okay. I don’t know about casualties. There might have been three or four hundred people in the power tap assembly structure, though . . . and we have some serious radiation casualties here. You guys got knocked off the netlink channels, but the netlink is still functioning most other places. Commander Fletcher took command and is getting things organized.”

“Excellent work,” Gray said. He could hear the urgency in the man’s voice, and decided it was better not to question him further. “Carry on.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He’d forgotten to ask what the man had meant by help being on the way, but it didn’t matter. Through the drone’s eye, he could see easily enough. The
Constitution
,
America
’s sister ship—immense and ponderous and proud—was angling in alongside. Less than half a kilometer off
America
’s starboard side, now, she was turning slowly to put herself exactly parallel.

And smaller ships—repair transporters and SAR vessels and even a captain’s gig were spilling from her launch bays and closing with the
America
.

“I think,” he told the officers and enlisted personnel with him, “we’re going to make it.”

Chapter Twenty-three

13 March 2425

Himmel-Paradisio Camp

Vulcan

40 Eridani A System

1615 hours, TFT

Connor lay stretched out flat on the hard ground, clutching the alien weapon in both hands. A line of Grdoch were advancing across the meadow in an open formation, moving slowly but steadily toward the gap blown in the perimeter wall.

“We’ve got to buy our people some time!” she told the others. The escaping prisoners had only just slipped through the gap.

“Maybe we won’t have to,” Weirton replied. “What the hell is going on over there?”

North, a series of blinding flashes walked along the horizon, the sound arriving long seconds later. “That’s the Twin Cities,” Delgado said. “They must be under attack!”

“Our fleet,” Connor said. “We must have grabbed local space control! But it may take the good guys a while to get out here. Don’t count on a rescue!”

“Maybe
they
don’t know that,” Weirton replied.

The Grdoch appeared to be confused—possibly fearful, certainly hesitant. Some were rolling away now, back toward the main gate. Others seemed inclined to keep advancing.

Connor argued with herself for a moment. Should she order the armed members of the group to fire? Or might that make the Grdoch currently retreating turn around and attack? Grdoch psychology was still not well understod. Certainly, it was more complex than the simplistic choice between flight or fight suggested by the pre-mission briefings.

She decided to wait. Had the Grdoch even seen them yet? No one knew how good their eyesight was. They could see in every direction, yes, but what kind of resolution did they have? If they hadn’t seen the humans lying on the ground near the gap yet, it might be better to surprise them.

And some of their number were definitely fleeing.

“Hold your fire,” she said, her voice low. “Let them go. The fewer there are . . .”

“. . . the fewer we have to kill,” Weirton said, grinning. “You think like a Marine, Lieutenant.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It was meant as one.”

There were still twenty or twenty-five of the scarlet horrors rolling toward them.

“We’re not going to be able to kill them all,” Delgado said.

“Kill enough of the bastards,” Connor said, “and maybe the rest will run.”

She hated this: the waiting, out in the open, not moving. For a fighter pilot, speed was life, and lying on the ground watching alien horrors advance on your position just didn’t cut it.

Connor didn’t think they were going to get out of this. Delgado was right. There was no way in hell they could drop all of the approaching Grdoch. She remembered how hard it had been to kill just three of the things . . . and that had been with an angry and suicidal mob with spears helping out. There were twelve of them there, holding the perimeter, and only three with high-tech weapons. Not enough . . . not enough by far . . .

The nearest Grdoch were a hundred meters away, now, and the group was picking up speed.

“Okay, people,” Connor said. “Drop ’em!”

She squeezed the firing bulb on her weapon. Two of the Grdoch staggered and writhed as a column of earth and smoke exploded in front of a third. One of them had missed. “Watch your targets, damn it! Don’t waste your shots!” She didn’t know how long the weapons would keep firing, and it was vital that they make every shot count.

Rather than continue to hammer at one Grdoch, she shifted her aim back and forth. If enough of them were hurt, they might break and run quicker than if only a couple were actually killed.

All of them were still coming.
Damn
, but they were hard to kill!

Connor was firing and firing and firing, her hands and wrists painful . . . then numb . . . and still the three of them were firing into the advancing line. The Grdoch were firing as well, now. An
Intrepid
enlisted man nearby shrieked and jumped up, his skin blackening horribly, and the ground began exploding in and in front of the human perimeter.

And then the ground in front of them erupted, a black wall of rising dirt and smoke and flame in a thunderous roar. The shock wave slapped Connor’s legs and torso
hard
. What the hell?

At first she thought the Grdoch had just fired a new and far more powerful weapon. These mouth-guns of theirs weren’t powerful enough to do
that
. . . .

Then she saw the Nightshades.

AGG-44 Nightshades—two-seater gravitic gunships—were Marine air- and space-support vehicles. Ugly, bug-like vehicles, they could only manage accelerations of about 12 Gs, but they were superb as low-altitude close-support, bristling with high-energy lasers and sky-to-ground missiles.

There were four of them, shrieking in from the north and whipping through the cloud of smoke and airborne debris they’d just released. They were close enough that Connor could see the USNA Marines legend on the sides, could feel the shudder in the air as the nearest whipped past.

“Ooh-rah
!”
Weirton yelled, rising to his feet and shaking his spear. “Get ’em, zoomies!
Get ’em!
”

The four aircraft vanished toward the south, but in moments they’d pulled up short and circled around for another pass. As the smoke from their first attack whisped away on a gentle breeze, Grdoch emerged . . . closer now, but Connor could only see fifteen of them now, and several were badly torn and bleeding.

“Keep firing!” she yelled, and she turned her weapon on the nearest Grdoch, blowing a bloody crater out of its torso and knocking it back a few steps. The others were wavering.

The Nightshades made a second pass, slower, now, and lower, literally skimming in a meter or two above the ground. She heard a high-pitched whine, a kind of buzz, and realized they were using their Gatlings on the aliens, chewing through the Grdoch at twelve depleted-uranium rounds per second.

“Anyone down there hear us?” a man’s voice said, speaking in her head.

“I’ve got you!” Connor replied. “Lieutenant Connor, VFA-96, USNS
America
.”

“Lieutenant Dillon, USNA Marines. Are those civilian prisoners down there with you?”

“Mixed bag, Dillon,” she replied. “Civilians, and a few off the
Intrepid
. Where do you want us?”

There was a pause, presumably as Dillon consulted a higher authority. “Actually, right there inside that compound would be good,” he told her. “I’ve told the Regimental CO, and they’ll have Marines here in a few mikes.”

Connor laughed. She laughed hard. It was not, she realized, funny, but the stress of the past hours had taken a toll, and the sheer relief of the rescue had made her giddy.

“We’ll have to track most of them down and get them back here,” she told Dillon. One of the Nightshades was hovering, she saw, looking for all the world like the head and body of a huge, black, squat dragonfly . . . and apparently looking right at her. Impulsively, she waved. In answer, the Nightshade rocked its fuselage port to starboard and back several times, an acknowledging waggle.

“It’s okay if you can’t round all of them up,” Dillon said. “From up here, it looks like the bad guys are on the run.”

“So . . . we won?”

There was a hesitation. “We won,” Dillon said at last. “But it cost us. Dear
God
, but it cost us.”

Connor felt a chill at the words, and wondered what had happened.

USNA CVS
America

40 Eridani A System

1927 hours, TFT

He’d transferred his flag to the
Constitution
. From the flag bridge of the new carrier, Gray and his command constellation had an unhindered view of surrounding space—of the USNA fleet in orbit, and the blue, white, and orange sweep of the planet turning below. The battle was over, both in orbit and on the ground.
Victory
 . . .

Mostly.

America
was surrounded by a cloud of smaller spacecraft—work drones and robots and transporters carrying out inspections and beginning repairs. The goal was to get her spaceworthy enough that she could be piloted back to Earth, and that meant replacing her power tap assembly.

To that end, scouts had identified a small planetoid in the system—there were two major asteroid belts circling 40 Eridani A—and fleet nanengineers were beginning the work of programming seed nano that would be able to disassemble the planetoid and grow a new power tap assembly. The work would take several weeks—much of that time devoted to the testing and balancing. If they couldn’t get everything purring along exactly right,
America
would have to stay here in Vulcan orbit until a ship-repair nanufactory could be built in this system. And there might be . . . political problems with that.

Though technically still part of the Earth Confederation, the locals had wholeheartedly joined in with the USNA task force. Captain del Castro, commanding the Confederation Vulcan battlegroup, had placed the ten ships of his contingent unreservedly under Gray’s command. His flag, the battlecruiser
Estrella de la Plata
, was alongside the USNA
Maine
now, taking off the last of that vessel’s survivors. The
Maine
was almost certainly beyond repair—her spine severed in three places, her shield cap and all-important gravitic projectors burned away. Out of her crew of two thousand, more than twelve hundred had been killed, including her skipper, Catharine Francesconi.
La Plata
’s SAR teams were still going through the wreckage compartment by compartment, searching for more survivors. Captain Francesconi, Gray knew now, had almost certainly saved
America
by interposing her ship between the Grdoch wreck and the star carrier.

As ship’s captain, Catharine’s first responsibility had been to her crew and her ship. As commander of the entire task force, it had been Gray’s job to see the larger picture, to move the different ships like pieces on a chessboard toward the mission objective as a whole, sacrificing some pieces if necessary.

And, damn it, the nature of war made it
always
necessary.

It would have been one thing had he ordered Captain Francesconi to block the enemy’s beam and save the
America
. But Catharine Francesconi had made that decision on her own.

Gray wondered if he would have been able to do the same, had the roles been reversed.

What he
had
done, he was all too aware, was underestimate an alien enemy, and that had very nearly cost him the star carrier
America
. Not exactly a career-enhancing move, though Gray cared little for the politics of naval careers. He’d told President Koenig, more than once, that he’d not wanted this job, the command of an entire carrier task force. Politics being what they were, he had no doubt whatsoever about the outcome, here. There wouldn’t be official retribution—at least
probably
there would not be, but he would be transferred to a desk Earth- or Mars-side and never command a task force
or
a ship again.

So be it. He’d done his best, and the best had not quite been good enough. He’d failed to establish communications with the Grdoch—not that they’d seemed all that willing to talk in the first place. He’d found what was left of the crews of
Intrepid
and the
Tomlinson
, one of the other ships of
Intrepid
’s task force, and that, at least, represented a mission success. Reports from the planet’s surface indicated that there were several hundred of them alive and well down there, under the able protection of Engelmann’s 1/5 Marines. And he’d convinced the locals to switch their allegiance from the Confederation to the USNA, though Gray knew that he’d had less to do with that decision than the Grdoch. All things considered, 40 Eridani had been a success. A
victory . . .

But as was always true with military victories, however, the outcome was a mix of success, failure, and terrible loss.

“Everything okay, Admiral?”
Constitution
’s skipper, Wade Harmon, had just floated up from the command bridge. “Getting settled in okay?”

“Just fine, Captain. Thank you.”

“There . . . ah . . . there’s a lot of scuttlebutt going around the
Connie
, Admiral. Talk about where the task force is headed next.”

“And what’s the consensus so far?”

“Earth. There’s a large minority that’s holding out for the ’Doch home planet, though.”

Gray laughed. “Well . . . we’d need to know just where that is. The Grdoch prisoners haven’t been real forthcoming in that regard as yet.”

There were almost eight thousand Grdoch now being held as prisoners of war, some rescued from fighters around Vulcan, most from the bases they’d established on the surface. Without space support, they’d all surrendered quickly enough. The XT people had been questioning some of them with the new language software, but with no success so far. Gray had seen the report. Eighty Grdoch questioned about the location of their home star system, all purportedly eager to please their captors, had given fifty-nine different answers, ranging from a red dwarf ten light years away to an ancient red giant within the galactic core. Those that could be checked out would be, of course, using robotic drones or recon squadrons, but that would take months, and Gray suspected that none of those fifty-nine would prove accurate. Had the Grdoch discovered the location of Sol and Earth, the results could have been cataclysmic, but, fortunately, pinpointing Sol would be a problem for beings looking for it. The fact that Earth was the third planet of a G2 star a bit less than halfway out from the galactic center was useless by itself, given the sheer number of stars and worlds fitting that description, and the system coordinates—and the programs necessary to translate those coordinates into something useful—were closely guarded secrets. The Grdoch would be no less cautious.

Even so, it had been a damned near thing. The Grdoch, evidently, had stumbled across the human colony at 40 Eridani, made contact with the Confederation forces there . . .
and then the dumb bastards had brought a Grdoch warship straight to Sol
. That ship had been destroyed at Enceladus, thank the gods, but the results could have been disastrous for Humankind had the Grdoch ship managed to escape. The Sh’daar had learned the exact coordinates of Earth decades ago, and two Sh’daar client races—the Turusch and the H’rulka—had brought the war into the Sol System; the Turusch had even been able to slam a high-velocity impactor into Earth herself with devastating results.