2166 - FORCE LIBERTY Page 4

  Dana said, "Mr. Reitz, zoom in on our landing zone." As he enlarged the coordinates over which they descended, it looked as if there was a separate city with the larger city. "Is that a fortress?"

  "Looks 20Ks wide."

  "I see concentric ringed walls." Security zones, she thought.

  "It's the palace of the Hive Regent Kesik," Gilead said.

  "That's a lot of concentric walls and kill zones between them and the rest of the city," Dana said. "Are they worried about a revolution or something?"

  Zooming in closer, the landing coordinates sent by the Shediri looked to point them inside the rings of walls and curling towers, at an open expanse of something that looked a lot like red, leafy vegetation." LiDAR measurements showed a texture more or less like lettuce leaves. "It's flat under that. I hope there's a hard surface," Dana said.

  Skolds said, "I hope we fit in the landing zone."

  What they'd be landing in would have been taken for some kind of walled park or parade ground in a military installation if it was on Earth. It was shaped like an elongated hexagon and surrounded by grouped structures like clusters of curling, rounded termite mounds, arranged on straight lines, but possessing none. They looked to be sixty to seventy meters high. They reached up for Taipan like clusters of fat, corkscrewing fingers all around the landing zone.

  "Well, will we fit?"

  Reitz said, "That long hexagon is 203 meters. 122 meters wide. We'll fit. The inverse field we're using to lower ourselves...it might bleed into the surrounding structures if we get off line in our descent."

  "NAV..."

  "I heard," Skolds said from the NAV console. "I've got this, Captain Sellis."

  Dana used to drive a carrier. She knew that assurance actually meant 'I'm too busy for your shit right now, Captain'.

  "Still no communication from the Shediri?" Her comms officer Weiss shook his head.

  "There isn't supposed to be," Gilead insisted.

  Reitz pointed to a projection he flicked up from his console. "I think I can see things moving on the ground."

  Like beetles. "Are those..."

  "Those are too big and too fast. Those are ground vehicles.... 5 to 15 meters. I can't make out the indigenous themselves yet. Wait..." Over his console she saw a separate projection now as he located individual shapes that looked to be Shediri moving together as a crowd. He enlarged them. People look like ants from high up. Shediri look like mites. They were skittering into the rounded structures.

  "Looks like they can see us."

  "They might run around like that all the time," Gilead said. "We simply don't know."

  In seconds, the curved tops of the structures surrounding the landing zone appeared to rocket upwards in front of the windows of the bridge

  "Speed now five meters per second and slowing... Reactor power to spare."

  "Deploy our landing gear." That ship hadn't set down on the surface of anything but a zero-gee dry-dock for two years. Dana was sure she felt a groaning vibration come up through the deck as the five, claw-footed landing platforms deployed under the teardrop of Taipan's hull.

  "2 meters per second..."

  "On target..."

  "Under one meter per second..."

  "Contact in 3...2...1..." The jolt told her they'd set down. "Smooth as can be," Skolds said. "Not a hint of bounce."

  "Hardway, we have landed safely on the fourth planet," Weiss reported.

  "Thank you for the transport, Captain Sellis," Special Envoy Gilead said. "It wasn't written in as part of the protocols, but if you promise not to interfere, you are welcome to observe me and my aides at this historic ceremony with the representative of the ruling Hive Regent Kesik."

  "I'd like tha-"

  "And if I could ask you to have your man shut down our on-board artificial gravity it would be appreciated. This is a small planet and local gravity is .22 gees. This ship operates at .3 gees standard and our Shediri guests might not enjoy it."

  "Of course. That was in your instructions."

  Her XO, Reitz said, "No activity immediately outside the ship yet..." He used the projectors to display the infrared and visual spectrum composite images of Taipan's immediate surroundings. The alien buildings wormed and corkscrewed into the sky around them. There was heat leaking from translucent sections dotting them. Those were windows, she thought, but she couldn't see in or see anything looking back.

  Gilead said, "I'll see you in the Reception Bay, Captain. We're on-schedule. We'll be opening your bay doors for the meeting in ten minutes."

  *

  The 'Reception Bay' as the UN Envoy had called it was actually a section of the cargo bay with external doors made to be accessible from the surface using a ramp that was hopefully not too steep for their alien guests in their native gravity.

  Captain Dana Sellis wore a new, black, Staas Company exosuit. She carried her helmet under her arm as she made her to the airlock leading into the bay in which the historic first meeting would take place.

  She held the airlock door for the last pair of the envoy's diplomatic aides while she double checked the seals on her helmet. For just an instant, when she glimpsed through their legs what was trundling along behind them, she thought Devlin's child had gotten loose from his cabin. "What the hell is that?" It had two humanoid legs almost a meter-long and hips and half a torso. It was the same front and back and it walked behind the aides the awkward way robots always seem to no matter how much precision guides their movements.

  The aide said, "That's a Human_C / Shediri_C conceptual matrix language translator. On legs."

  "The translator is a conceptual matrix...it's a piece of software running on a daemon; why is it walking around?" It was disturbing how the robot didn't have any apparent eyes, but didn't run into anything as it followed the aides into the lock. Dana shut the hatch behind it, and the cycle began.

  Gilead's aide said, "The software-based translator has our exosuits speaking directly to the aliens using the audio transducers in our suits or a common RF channel. That's dangerous. We thought if the translator had a physical presence, then it might act as a kind of psychological buffer if someone says something bad by mistake." She nodded somewhat absently. Dana heard him, but she was lost in how young he was. Exo-linguistics hadn't even been a field of study until contact with the Squidies. "They're hoping the aliens will blame the bot," he said, "not us. It wasn't my idea. That was the exo-psychologist."

  "That's me," the other one said. She chuckled then and shook her head inside her helmet. "But I don't pretend to understand what goes on in a human mind let alone an alien one."

  The airlock opened onto a bay that had been cleared of anything that couldn't stand a sterilizing bath of cool plasma. They'd have to decontaminate after the ceremony and the meeting. The gear had already been mounted there. A single maneuvering nacelle from a longboat set to neutral pressure and mounted to the deck would do the trick. The cool plasma would fog. She hoped the power conduits could take the scorching. It would be enough to kill anything they hoped, even prions. The exosuits were rated for worse.

  The aides from the airlock went to stand with Special Envoy Gilead and two other aides as the translator bot struggled to keep up. Dana hung back and gestured in front of her helmet for comms. "Mr. Reitz," she said. He was on the bridge and he could see far more than her. "Any activity outside yet?"

  "It's starting. There's movement."

  "Show me."

  He patched a feed through to her. Projected in her visor, she saw a view of the ground in front of the still closed doors of the bay. Those red lettuce leaves covered the ground, layered over each other now in a pattern radiating outwards from Taipan. Between the high, rounded clusters of pale, alien buildings were paved, open spaces. They'd be called roads on Earth or very wide promenades. Several fed onto the elongated hexagon of a parade ground they'd landed on. She could see down two of them with the feed Reitz gave her, and she saw movement on both.

  "Ground vehicles," he said.
<
br />   They were big enough to be personnel carriers. And they looked armored. Their fronts were sloped and shiny and dark with curving armor plates and lances like stag beetles. If they had wheels, she couldn't see them. From the glow around them and what she knew of the neon content of the atmo, she surmised the vehicles were floating on field-based devices like pinches, but she couldn't guess what moved them forward and back.

  Dazzle patterns and stripes decorated them like they'd seen on some of the Shediri ships. The lack of color made her wonder if they even saw color at all.

  "They're approaching from all sides of the landing zone. They're surrounding the ship," Reitz said.

  "Do you see any guns?"

  "How would I know....wait. Something else is coming. You should be able to..."

  "I see it." It was another vehicle, larger and completely different from all the others. It looked like a black worm, a fat, garden worm covered in hard plates like bone or maybe chitin. The bottom of it didn't touch the stone, but it undulated as it moved like there was fluid and a flexible skin under those armor plates. It stopped some fifty meters in front of the cargo bay doors. The forward end of it parted and opened wide with something more like a iris or sphincter muscle than a door. She couldn't see inside. And nothing came out.

  "Isn't it just like a VIP to make you wait," Reitz said in her ear.

  Distracted by the projections in her helmet and the conversation with her XO on a private channel, it took her a moment to notice the UN's Special Envoy was beckoning to her. "Come over here and stand with us at the top of the ramp, Captain," Gilead said, "You won't get underfoot, I promise." Gilead gestured to a spot in the rear. As she approached, the envoy said, "You can see the feed outside, yes?"

  Dana nodded in her helmet. "I can."

  "I can see it as well. I believe the representative of Hive Regent Kesik has arrived. It's time to open the reception bay doors."

  "Mr. Reitz," Dana said to her XO on the bridge, "Since local controls are disabled, would you open the external doors for us please and lower the ramp to the surface."

  Dana felt the vibrations in the deck from the armored external doors sliding to the side along the outer hull for fifteen seconds, then the knock as each of them stopped. She swore she could see the pinkish atmo seeping into her ship already. The steel of the lowering cargo ramp was now the only thing between them and the Shediri homeworld. It began to swing down and lower like a drawbridge, letting the rose light of that alien place inside.

  A condensate of some kind formed from the mixing atmospheres, but by the time the ramp lowered enough for them to see the ground, the fog was gone and they could see the worm-like transport and its open front door. The Shediri appeared to be worried about contamination and diseases, too. What came out of the VIP vehicle wore an alien exosuit painted in black and white dazzle patterns.

  Hard plates over flexible skin moved with its numerous appendages. It had legs that it walked on inside that suit, but four of them and jointed to the side like an insect. It had a long abdomen and an upright upper body and four upper appendages like arms. At the end of two of those appendages, it carried something like small axes or hatchets, but with a stub-blade on two sides and a pike tip so it was almost more of a finned spear. The smooth helmet the alien wore looked opaque to her eyes.

  The creature moved with fast, almost twitching motions. It exited the vehicle followed by another and another. Fourteen like it dismounted from whatever that transport was and after they'd arranged themselves with those weapons across their chests, Dana knew the VIP would come next.

  The representative of Hive Regent Kesik wore a bright yellow suit. Dana doubted her vision for a split second because this bug was physically different from the others. They were guards, soldiers. It was....something else. It didn't appear to have any aides, but it should have. Its legs were shorter, almost comically so. It had at least fifty legs below, none longer than twenty centimeters. You could barely see them and there was no bobbing motion to its walk so it looked to glide painfully slow. It possessed an extra pair of appendages on its upper body for a total of six. The head was large as were the eyes. She could see through the helmet on this one. This one had eyes like a spider, all over its head. The skin between them was muddy pink with greenish veins. Coarse hairs sprung from it like thick wires.

  It approached Taipan on mincing little steps so fast they were almost a blur. Those legs were so short and its escorts were so much faster that the escorts had to advance one step and wait for the VIP bug to catch up before they advanced again. It took them almost a minute to cross the thirty yards from the transport to the base of the ramp into the bay.

  The representative of the Hive didn't stop when it reached the base of the ramp. It scuttled up with a surprising burst of speed. Its body was three meters in length and when it 'stood' in front of them, the upright portions of it made it a full head taller than Dana. All its eyes stared at them.

  Her XO's voice suddenly came through on every comms channel at once, including the diplomatic channel for the envoy. "This is Reitz! The task force is under fire! Repeat! Hardway is under fire! Abort the meeting with the Shediri. Abort! Get that thing off the ship! We're going to ascend!"

  "What is he saying?" the UN Envoy asked, refusing to accept what he'd heard.

  She said, "Is it the attack from the Shediri? Are you sure?"

  "Yes! There's hundreds of missiles inbound! They attacked the task force! It's all a tra-"

  "Reitz?" The channel had gone dead. "Reitz!"

  Dana had forgotten all about the translator bot. It had been placed itself a meter in front of them and now stood between them and the Shediri representative. Since her XO screamed his warnings on all channels including the diplomatic channel, the translator bot heard it and had repeated everything he said. It translated for the Shediri standing in front of them, making in a disturbing hissing and clicking clatter that presumably the alien heard through a suit mic.

  She decided the alien not only heard, but it understood the translation because it looked like it bowed then, but it bent its 'torso' backwards over its lower body so that its head pointed behind it and away from them. With all its alien eyes it refused to meet their gaze.

  "Get out!" she shouted at it, and the bot translated.

  "Captain, no!" Gilead tried to step between her and the alien, and Dana didn't let her.

  "Get off my ship!" she shouted at it, and as the volume from the translator bot increased, the Shediri in front of her bent its giant earwig's body forwards again to face her. It swayed at the top, back and forth so that all of its eyes on all sides of its head could see her. Hiss and clacking noises and a whistle came out some kind of speaker on the alien's suit.

  The bot delivered its translation in a thin male voice. "Action is truth."

  All six of the Shediri VIP's upper appendages drummed its body, making a rapid-fire, staccato series of sharp, snapping cracks against the chest of its alien suit. It shrieked then with a continuous wailing cry like a broken violin. The flash from its torso was the first Dana saw of the bomb.

  The image she saw in the next ten-thousandth of a second burned onto her retina. She saw the top and bottom parts of the bug, but not the middle. That was already gone. Pieces of it already flew outwards from a blinding flash. Two ten-thousandths of a second after the detonation began, the combusting fireball front of an atmospheric shock wave slammed Dana and seared her and sent her flying into a bulkhead with the UN envoy and his aides..

  Captain Sellis saw darkness and then flashes of black and white, dazzle-painted armor and dozens of alien legs covered in red spatter. She saw lightning in the bay and then fountains of blood the acrid green color of hydraulic fluid. Blackness again. Then, human faces in helmets looking down at her and hands dragging her... Then, velveteen darkness.

  5

  SCS Hardway

  "We've lost comms with Taipan."

  "Get it back," Ram said. "Get them up here!"

  "Why th
e hell is this happening!" Cyning shouted. "What did they do down there? What did they say wrong?"

  "We can sort that later, Mr. Cyning. Kindly strap yourself in at the diplomatic console."

  The missiles had been stealthy. Even with radar and LiDAR pinging away, the task force hadn't seen them until at least a minute after they'd come over the horizon from the other side of he planet.

  "The Shediri missiles will be in cannon range of the forward CAP elements in seconds," Pardue said, now reaching out to the projections over her console and redirecting the fighters and gunnery junks flying the combat air patrol on the task force's collective starboard side to intercept and destroy the incoming bombs. "Alert fighters are launching. So are the gunnery junks."

  The junks that launched out of the topside of the primaries gunned it and cooked their bays. The fire shot out in geysers around the junks as they launched. The Sky Jack fighters that tore out of the forward bays took the lead.

  "LiDAR fix on the incoming is still intermittent," Biko reported. The Shediri missiles had now been added to the tactical projection of the planet. They flew in an amorphous cloud like locusts, all of them coming for the task force together. They weren't fast, but presumably they hoped to overwhelm the task force's defenses with sheer numbers. They might just, Ram thought.

  "NAV, tuck us in closer to Guerrero," he told the lieutenant there. This was Wei's first action.

  "Using the small thrusters."

  "This is Hellcat 1-1. We're engaging." The flashes dotted orbital space over the night side of the planet almost immediately. "The missiles cook off pretty easy under 140mm cannon fire," the Sky Jack pilot reported.

  As the carrier's gunnery junks came on station and opened up with their 4x140mm turrets, the detonation flashes became a rolling front of starbursts that lit the cloud of missiles behind it. Ram reached up and selected a patch of them and enlarged it until he could see the pebble of the matte black material on the alien missiles' skins. No IR sig at all... "What's the current count?"