Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) (16 page)

For now though, duty compelled him to appear on Titan’s bridge right alongside the admiral.

‘Boo.’

Marshall flinched, still unaccustomed to Schmidt’s peculiar sense of humor.

‘You do that again, I swear I’ll switch you off. What’s the situation with our new passengers?’

‘One appears to be alive and recovering,’ Schmidt reported, ‘the other two are touch and go.’

Marshall nodded, apparently satisfied. ‘How long before it regains consciousness?’

‘
It
is a
he
,’ Schmidt scolded, ‘and
he
will be conscious within ten minutes or so.’

Marshall turned from the command platform and glanced at the XO, Olsen.

‘You have the bridge,’ he said. ‘I want to be there when
it
wakes up.’

Schmidt scowled in disappointment. ‘They are as human as we are.’

‘You’re not human,’ Marshall reminded Schmidt without looking back as he walked toward the bridge exit.

‘Fear and prejudice are the currency of mankind, to lash out far easier than to reach out,’ Schmidt droned as Marshall continued to walk away.

‘Meet me in the sick bay.’

*

Admiral Marshall strode onto the sick bay two minutes later and watched as the surgeons monitored the capsule as the Ayleean within was gradually warmed, Schmidt fussing over them and generally worrying about the whole process. The doctor’s duty of equal care for all life was undoubted and unquestioned, but for Marshall willingly saving the life of an Ayleean had been a hard decision to make and one that he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t later regret.

The bay was mostly filled with gravity beds that were empty, few sick crew members present as Schmidt approached the admiral.

‘He’s almost hypothermically viable,’ the doctor reported, ‘and we’ve extracted him from the capsule but placed him in full manacles.’

‘Good,’ Marshall replied, noting the eight armed Marines posted around the sick bay, all of them watching the Ayleean lying now on the gravity bed before them.

The Aleeyan was eight feet tall and bore only a superficial resemblance to a human being. A powerful musculature was visible beneath a hard, leathery skin that was mostly dark brown but flecked with patches of lighter color, almost gold. Dressed in metallic armor that covered approximately half of the Aleeyan’s body, the rest was naked but for the thin, skin–like nano–carbon fiber shielding that the species traditionally wore. Its head was a tangled mess of thick black hair surrounding a heavy jaw and hunched shoulders. One eye was covered by a device that seemed to be some kind of laser sight, a thin red beam flickering as it caught on dust motes in the air. The Aleeyan had small, sharp teeth that had been ritualistically filed, its lips thin and regressed as though the creature was showing a permanent snarl.

Marshall recoiled inwardly from the sight of the creature, something so human and yet so utterly removed from anything that he was capable of considering human that he had to physically resist the urge to draw his service pistol and vaporize the horrendous creature where it lay on the bed.

‘How long?’ he asked.

Schmidt glanced at the surgeons and one of them replied without turning its mechanical head toward the admiral.

‘Sixty seconds.’

Marshall turned to the handful of other patients all watching the exchange fearfully. ‘Clear the bay.’

The Marines complied quickly, but not as quickly as the patients who filed in silence out of the bay and were gone within seconds. Moments later, Marshall heard a low and guttural growl.

The Ayleean shifted on the bed, its muscular limbs twitching sporadically as it slowly regained consciousness. Marshall remained in position, his hands behind his back as he fought the urge to take a pace back from the Ayleean as its fearsome yellow eye suddenly flickered open. The manacles around its wrists clinked as it lifted its arms, and that hunter’s eye swivelled around to glare at Marshall.

The Ayleean let out a horrendous shriek of outrage and the Marines dashed in, plasma rifles pulled into their shoulders and aimed directly at the warrior as it glared left and right and then down at the restraints pinning it in place.

Marshall stepped a pace closer, detected the primal scents of leathery flesh and bad breath, metal and musky skin.

‘You’re safe,’ he said, knowing that the Ayleeans still understood human language, their own vocabulary a sort of Pigdin English.

The Ayleean snarled at the admiral. ‘Set me free, coward! Where am I?!’

‘CSS Titan,’ Marshall replied. ‘You’re in the care of our doctors and…’

‘You attacked my ship!’ the Ayleean roared, the metal restrains clanging as they were pulled taut. ‘I’m not safe!’

‘We didn’t attack your ship,’ Marshall insisted. ‘We detected an emergency distress signal and we responded. We found what was left of your vessel, yourself and two others encased in survival capsules. What happened to you?’

The Ayleean peered at them suspiciously. ‘We were attacked, I don’t know by whom. We were overwhelmed.’

Marshall stepped closer to the Ayleean, concern flickering like a dim beacon in an immense darkness. ‘Overwhelmed by what?’

The Ayleean stared at him for a moment longer, and perhaps he recognized something in the admiral’s eyes that convinced him that the humans were not responsible for whatever had destroyed their vessel. To Marshall’s amazement, the Ayleean stopped straining against his bonds and spoke with an urgency, a fear even, the like of which Marshall had never encountered from the species.

‘They came out of nowhere,’ the warrior growled, ‘too many, too much firepower. We were obliterated before we even knew what hit us. Engines gone, crew annihilated, no weapons to return fire. I and a few others made a run for the capsules in the hope that they would think us all dead and pass us by.’

Marshall began to experience a deep sense of dread as he looked into the warrior’s eye.

‘Did you get a look at them? Were they pirates with some kind of new weapon?’

The Ayleean shook his head slowly.

‘They were not pirates,’ he replied. ‘They weren’t even human. There’s something out there and it’s hunting us, hunting anything it encounters.’

***

XVII

Polaris Station

‘Back here, again.’

Detective Vasquez had served almost a decade upon the legendary military station, still by far the largest orbital platform ever constructed by humanity. At some twenty miles in height, and four in circumference, the orbital space station resembled in some respects a giant mushroom with a vertical tail extending down and a spire up from its center, the entire station located in orbit around Saturn’s gigantic rings.

The spectacular panorama of the gas giant’s pale hue and the vast rings was eclipsed by the station’s angular, steel gray bulk as the shuttle moved in toward one of the smaller landing bays around its outer rim. Foxx watched as her companion gazed out at the vast platform, at the constellation of tiny lights flickering around the enormous ring–shaped body, home to some seven thousand fleet personnel on a rotational basis.

Vasquez had served with the Marines before joining the police force in his native New Washington, his military training a vital asset to the force which coveted its former soldier recruits. Foxx knew little of Vasquez’s service history, other than he had served in the Second Ayleean War before being honorably discharged.

‘Home from home?’ Betty asked. ‘My guess is Marines. You miss it?’

Foxx leaned forward and saw in revetments sunk into the station the sight of massive warships belonging to the CSS fleet, anchored in their bays as routine servicing on their immense hulls was carried out by both human and robotic hands. Smaller shuttles on ferry flights reflected the sunlight as they flew out of the station and turned onto headings for other locations in the solar system as Foxx’s shuttle slowed and glided with the effortless grace of space flight toward the landing bays.

‘Not so much,’ Vasquez replied to Betty, still gazing out at the vast station. ‘I was glad to get out.’

‘Did you contact Titan’s armory?’ Foxx asked him as the shuttle flew into Polaris’s enormous landing bay and touched down.

‘Sure,’ Vasquez replied, not taking his eyes off the spectacular view until it was entirely blocked by the more mundane interior of the landing bay. ‘A sergeant there told me that no weapons had gone missing from the armory in years, so we must be mistaken. They have their inventory ready and we’ve been given access to all but the most classified of weapons.’

Foxx frowned. ‘That’s not access to everything though, is it,’ she pointed out. ‘We’re looking for somebody who’s actively trying to smuggle weapons.’

‘Yeah, MM–15 pistols, not some heavily guarded super–weapon,’ Vasquez pointed out. ‘If there’s one place that’s going to be secure on that score it’s the ship’s armory. There must be something else going on here.’

Foxx shrugged as she followed Vasquez off the shuttle’s boarding ramp and into the largest landing bay she’d ever seen. Rank after rank of shuttles and fighters were parked in multiple lines, some of them suspended from overhead cranes as crews worked on them.

‘Now there are some beauties I’d like to get my hands on,’ Betty beamed as she surveyed the ranks of sleek
Phantom
fighters.

Despite its gargantuan size the bay was immaculately clean, the sound of machinery humming or whining in the background and the smell of ion fuel and lubricants tainting the air.

‘Detective Foxx?’

Foxx turned to see a bulky, fit looking man in a CSS uniform extend his hand to her. ‘Sergeant Higgins, you’re here for the armory.’

It wasn’t a question and both Foxx and Vasquez stepped in line with the sergeant as he gestured toward an exit to their right.

‘We have evidence of former military weapons showing up on the streets of the orbital cities and even on the surface,’ Foxx replied, her own clipped tones mimicking those of the sergeant. ‘We’re here to see if we can back trace the leak.’

‘There’s no leak,’ Higgins replied tersely. ‘I can assure you of that.’

‘These weapons didn’t show up out of thin air,’ Vasquez said. ‘This armory is the only place that decommissioned weapons are sent to after service.’

‘That’s right,’ Higgins said as they walked out of the bay and down a long, immaculately polished corridor lined with soft blue strips of light, ‘and this is where they stay. All weapons are uniquely tagged and catalogued before going into storage or being destroyed. We haven’t had a single firearm go missing for decades, and certainly not since I took over.’

‘You run the armory?’ Betty asked.

‘Not the whole thing, but I control what comes in and what goes out, what form it’s in, how it’s catalogued. If somebody’s been lifting weapons out of the armory, then it’s me.’

Foxx blinked at the sergeant’s forthright statement. ‘So you’re admitting to murder?’

Higgins stopped in his tracks and looked at her. ‘You’re investigating a homicide?’

‘The murder of a man named Anthony Ricard in San Diego,’ Vasquez replied. ‘Although this line of enquiry is not yet directly connected to the homicide case, we believe that the two may be linked.’

Higgins started walking again, a little slower this time. ‘What was the murder weapon?’

‘We don’t know right now, beyond the fact that it was a plasma charge that killed Anthony Ricard,’ Foxx replied. ‘However, in a case on New Washington we recovered from a known criminal an MM–15 plasma pistol.’

‘Former Marine service weapon,’ Higgins replied as they walked, ‘decommissioned a few years back. They’re all stored here in the armory.’

‘How come they’re not destroyed?’ Foxx asked.

‘Prudence,’ Higgins replied. ‘If another war with the Ayleeans kicked off, we’d prefer to have too many weapons than not enough. The MM–15s are kept here in the expectation that we’ll need them again some day.’

Higgins led them to a set of steel doors guarded by four Marines. Foxx and Allen waited as their ID chips were scanned, and then the Marines let them through into a chamber, the doors shutting behind them.

‘Full body scan and weapons detectors,’ Higgins explained as they stood in the chamber.

‘We’re both armed,’ Foxx said. ‘Betty isn’t.’

‘The scanners will have already detected your service weapons and matched them to the police force database,’ Vasquez told her. ‘We’ll be cleared shortly.’

Sergeant Higgins glanced over his shoulder at Vasquez. ‘You been here before?’

‘Fourth Marines,’ Vasquez replied.

Moments later, a small green light appeared on the doors before them and they were allowed access into the outer armory, where two soldiers manned a desk and another security gate. One of the men was human, the other a military
Holosap
who greeted the sergeant with a sharp salute.

‘At ease,’ Higgins replied as he gestured to the two detectives. ‘Ryan, would you escort these two detectives to the main armory. Give them everything that they need.’

Vasquez’s eyes widened as he stared at the
Holosap
. ‘Ryan?!’

The Holosap stared back at Vasquez and a mixture of amazement and joy burst upon his features. ‘Vasquez the Vacant!’

The
Holosap
vanished from the security desk and appeared right alongside Vasquez. ‘Holy crap, bro’!’

‘You two know each other?’ Foxx asked.

‘Hell yeah!’ Vasquez said as he made to embrace the Holosap and then hesitated as his hands passed through Ryan’s shimmering blue projection. The two men shifted position to try to shake hands instead, and then Ryan sighed and shrugged, slightly embarrassed.

‘Guess we can’t do all that so easily these days,’ Vasquez said.

‘Not so much.’

‘Did you two serve together?’ Sergeant Higgins asked.

‘You bet,’ Ryan nodded eagerly. ‘Two tours outside of Ayleea, CSS Perseus. We got into some right gigs man, I mean, sergeant.’

‘At ease, Ryan,’ Higgins smiled. ‘Why not take an hour off with these guys? I’ll have Seavers come in and take over your post.’

Ryan saluted sharply in delight, and turned to Vasquez. ‘Armory’s this way. Now, what’s this about a homicide, bro’?’