Titan (Old Ironsides Book 2) (20 page)

‘The same as he did,’ came the reply, ‘white light and flames.’

Terok thought for a moment before he spoke. ‘I think that we should ask to contact Ayleea, to warn them of what is coming. I think that we should ally ourselves to the humans.’

Zerin almost snapped his restraints as he jerked upright on his bed. ‘Death before dishonor!’

‘There is no dishonor in joining forces against a mutual enemy,’ Terok pointed out, ‘especially as this one may attack the humans as viciously as it did us. We could be vulnerable here, now. Our families could be next and we’re not doing anything to warn them.’

Zerin’s fury tempered and he glanced at the Marines, who were standing guard with their backs to the cube.

‘They cannot hear us,’ he growled. ‘They don’t
wish
to hear us.’

‘The doctor will return,’ Terok said. ‘We shall inform him of what we know, and hopefully he will accept our request.’

‘It will be seen as weakness,’ Zerin warned.

‘We
are
weak!’ Terok insisted. ‘In the face of whatever destroyed our ship, we are as nothing! Together, we may be stronger.’

The other Ayleean nodded slowly and Terok sighed again, this time in relief.

‘You agree, brother?’

‘Yes,’ came the reply, ‘I agree entirely. Which is why it cannot be allowed to happen.’

Terok frowned. ‘What?’

The Ayleen looked across at him, and before Terok’s eyes the flesh of his entrapped arm began to change, began to glow with what looked almost like heat as it became longer, slimmer. Moments later, like some horrendous snake, it slid from the restraints and detached entirely from the Ayleean’s shoulder as it slithered across his chest and headed toward Zerin and then split into two, the second section heading for Terok.

Terok watched in horror as the tendril of flesh made its way across the quarantine cube toward Zerin.

‘Hey, let us out of here!’

Terok’s cry was deafeningly loud inside the cube, but the hard–light blocked all sound and the Marines outside did not respond. Terok looked at the Ayleean alongside him, saw its features devoid of compassion or anything that he recognized as remotely human.

‘You didn’t survive the attack, you are our attacker! What are you?!’

The creature smiled a cold, brutal smile of absolute knowledge and power.

‘I am your end.’

Zerin was bellowing now for assistance as the tendril of pulsing flesh crawled up the bedside and slithered alongside his head. Terok cried out as loud as he could as he saw Zerin’s terror and then heard the Ayleean’s scream as the tendril suddenly burrowed into his ear, thrusting and pulsing and squirming as it forced itself into his skull. Zerin’s shriek of agony suddenly became a warbling, jerking gag as his body trembled and his limbs twitched, his eyes rolling up in their sockets as the horrific growth punctured his brain and suddenly Zerin fell silent and still. The worm–like growth emerged from his ear a moment later and flopped to the deck, a stream of dark red blood spilling out in thick strings after it.

Terok stared at the creature on the bed next to him as he saw the second tendril crawl up onto the bed next to his face.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ he gasped.

The reply came a moment later, just as Terok felt something cold and hard press against his ear.

‘I know.’

A fierce white pain seared Terok’s ear and burst like an explosive inside his skull and he opened his mouth to scream as he felt the hideous creature burrow remorselessly into his brain.

***

XX

CSS Titan

Admiral Marshall walked back onto the command platform in time to see Lieutenant Foxx and Detective Allen dash onto the bridge.

‘Admiral,’ Foxx said, ‘we have a problem.’

‘I have several,’ Marshall said wearily, ‘don’t tell me that you’re going to add to the list.’

‘We believe that there is a conspiracy to initiate a prison riot on Tethys Gaol.’

‘Riot?’ Marshall echoed. ‘What the hell for, there’s nowhere for the prisoners to go and they’d never get out of those blocks anyway.’

‘They will if they’re armed,’ Detective Allen insisted. ‘We have evidence that an Officer Anthony Ricard was responsible for transporting weapons between Tethys and Polaris Station. He had access to the weapons during that time, and may have altered their programming.’

‘Altered it how?’

‘We’re not certain yet,’ Foxx admitted, ‘but it appears that Ricard may have been altering or removing the security chips that prevent inmates and civilians from firing the weapons, while also exchanging them for non–military weapons and smuggling MM–15 plasma pistols planet–side for sale.’

Marshall froze in motion as he considered this. ‘If the prisoners riot, you think they’ll try to take over the prison’s armory?’

‘Or even the guard’s weapons,’ Foxx confirmed. ‘ID chips control who is able to fire a given weapon. Inmates can’t use them because they won’t respond to an unknown DNA, but if the chips have been altered to accept any user then the inmates could create hell. If we don’t get in there and stop them they could take over the gaol. That’s hundreds of high–security inmates, all of them looking for a way off the prison to freedom. If they have hostages…’

‘They’ll be able to bargain,’ Marshall nodded as he understood the urgency and turned to the communications officer. ‘Contact the Ayleeans and tell them that we’ll shortly be preparing their brethren for transport to their ship, and we need them to drop their jamming so that…’

‘Incoming signal, super–luminal bow shock at fifty thousand meters!’

Admiral Marshall barely had time to think as the alert was cried across the bridge, let alone react to the Tactical Officer’s warning as every pair of eyes on the bridge swivelled to look at the main display screen.

Fifty thousand meters, just fifty kilometres away, was less than the blink of an eye at super–luminal velocity, a fraction of a second for Marshall’s all–too–human brain to calculate a response in an instant of time and thought. Rapid approach, an ambush of some kind entirely similar to that which had been suffered by their Ayleean captors. Titan’s sensors were capable of detecting an Ayleean vessel’s approach at a hundred times that distance, meaning they were facing an unknown technology that was going to be upon them at the same moment that Marshall’s brain was able to process the fact that they were there at all.

Words spilled from the admiral’s lips without conscious thought, as though he were listening to somebody else speaking.

‘Dive, all shields up and fire all cannons at the first visible threat!!’

Titan went into an immediate dive, her broad bow dropping as the helmsman responded to the command with the speed of thought, the Ayleean cruiser nearby likewise diving away from the new arrival as her escorting frigates split up to bring their weapons to bear. Titan’s shields flickered into life even as Marshall saw on the main screen a spherical distortion of the star fields as the fabric of space–time was bulged outward by the approaching vessel and it suddenly rocketed into sight with a blinding flare of white light.

Titan’s starboard plasma cannons opened up even before Marshall’s brain had processed the incredible sight that lay before him. For the first time in human history an unequivocal encounter between human beings and an undeniably extra–terrestrial race had occurred, and mankind’s first action had been to open fire upon that race with some of the most powerful weapons ever created by human hands. Schmidt’s words echoed through Marshall’s mind as he watched the plasma charges burst into view on the screen like new born stars and zip with phenomenal speed across the space between Titan and the new arrival.

Fear and prejudice are the currency of mankind, to lash out far easier than to reach out.

The ship was vast, probably twice Titan’s length and constructed in a way that defied all natural instincts. Marshall gazed upon a form so utterly strange that he struggled to actually identify what he was looking at.

The entire vessel appeared to be being encased in some kind of gel that crept swiftly across its surface, a vast and glossy bubble of material that conformed to the shape of the ship within like a set of visible shields while dimly reflecting the star fields, Saturn and the plasma blasts soaring toward it. Within the strange substance was entombed a recognizably mechanical and metallic spacecraft that was none the less shaped nothing like either a fleet warship or an Ayleean cruiser. Long and slender, gracefully tapered at the bow and stern, it had the appearance of a stretched bullet except for the ragged gashes down the hull from which the bizarre gel oozed in vast quantities. As the ship loomed closer Marshall could see that its hull was constructed from what looked like a twisted bundle of giant braided cables, each as thick as fifty men and wrapping around each other like gigantic metal snakes, catching the light from Saturn’s glow as it turned.

From the huge hull burst striations of the shimmering gel, reaching out like gigantic probing icicles across the freezing vacuum of space toward Titan, as though the vessel was entrapped within the tentacles of some tremendous sea creature.

The plasma bursts from Titan’s guns smashed into the hull and Marshall squinted as titanic explosions rocked the alien ship. Hull plating was ripped from the superstructure in tremendous blasts, the ship riven with brilliant orange and red flares as power conduits and fuel lines were ignited by the massive volumes of energy being dumped into the ship’s interior.

The writhing, immense tentacles of icy material receded as though recoiling from the blasts as the ship rolled away from the onslaught and drifted by through the blackness, her shattered form only visible in the explosions and the reflections of Titan’s own exterior lights as the entire fleet passed into Saturn’s immense shadow.

A roar of cheers went up from the crew even as Marshall realized that they had no true idea of whether this ship was even a foe. He consoled himself that they had chosen, whoever they were, to rush directly into another species’ space without warning and come out of super–luminal travel in what could only be interpreted as an ambush attack.

‘Direct hits to main hull and aft superstructure!’ Olsen reported as he scanned the tactical displays. ‘We’re getting fluctuating power readings from within, looks like they’re already pretty badly beaten up!’

A sudden, whining, screeching noise deafened the admiral and he threw his hands to his ears as the communications officer scrambled on her work station to shut off the feed. The infernal noise died down into the background as Marshall called across to her, his ears still ringing.

‘What the hell was that?’

‘Some kind of jamming signal from the alien vessel,’ the officer replied, her own expression twisted with pain from the awful cacophony. ‘It’s blocking everything, all frequencies. It’ll take time to push through it.’

Marshall frowned as he saw the ship once again being fully encased now in the strange gel. The fires from the plasma blasts were swiftly extinguished as the gel consumed the raging firestorms across the gargantuan hull. He moved closer to the screen and saw the deep gashes in the ship’s hull more clearly, could see the superstructure within, lights functioning despite the massive internal damage.

‘You getting any life forms?’ he asked the communications officer.

The officer stared at her screens in amazement as she replied.

‘Massive responses,’ she confirmed. ‘It’s literally full of life.’

Marshall looked at the substance enclosing the ship and then barked a command.

‘Helm, full astern, get us away from her!’

The ship responded instantly, reversing thrust and beginning to turn away from the new arrival as Marshall whirled to the Tactical Officer.

‘Full scans of her on all wavelengths!’ he ordered.

‘Aye sir!’

The Executive Officer moved to Marshall’s side. ‘What is it?’

Marshall gripped the command rail as he looked at the alien vessel before them.

‘The ship’s not the enemy,’ he said simply. ‘Whatever it’s encased in, that’s our enemy.’

Olsen stepped forward, squinting at the screen. ‘What do you think it is?’

Marshall shook his head. In flight school many decades before, when he had been a newly minted fleet officer and had just joined a squadron of
Razor
fighters based out of Polaris Station, he and his fellow pilots had been given a briefing on what to expect if they ever encountered an alien species. Although such an event had not occurred in Marshall’s long career until now, it had been clear from day one of his training that CSS expected contact to occur eventually.

There had long been rumors of spurious signals emanating from distant corners of the Local Group, the collective name for a number of galaxies scattered across deep space beyond the Milky Way, with its nearest neighbour, Andromeda, gaining the greatest attention. Larger and older than mankind’s natal galaxy, there would have been more time for third–generation stars to form, and thus longer for the planets they harbored to develop intelligent life and for that life to embark on an inevitable journey to the stars.

Marshall could not remember all of the fascinating briefing, but one thing that had been made clear was that in all likelihood, the first encounter between man and a truly extra–terrestrial species would be one where neither side quite understood what they were looking at.

‘Get Schmidt up here, right now.’

Olsen put out a call and moments later Schmidt shimmered genie–like into view on the bridge.

‘Captain,’ he began, ‘Were the capsule signals checked against our…’

‘Forget them,’ Marshall cut him off as he gestured with a nod to the main display screen, ‘we’ve got a bigger problem.’

Schmidt turned and then froze in motion. He watched the screen for a long moment and then spoke softly.

‘May I have access to the tactical scans?’

Marshall nodded to the relevant officer, and Schmidt’s eyes closed and his projection pulsed softly as he absorbed the vast reams of data being processed by Titan’s sensors.