2166 - FORCE LIBERTY Page 7

  "Bay One," Pardue said. "Primary bays, topside, at the base of the carrier's command tower."

  "Did you get that, Captain?"

  Chun began to push back again even though he knew the law was on Cyning's side. Ram was embarrassed when the company man waved his hand signaling the comms officer to terminate the communication. The lieutenant at comms waited for Ram's reluctant nod before hanging up on the UN captain. Chun deserved better.

  Ram asked Cyning straight out. "How did that provision get in the agreement?"

  The company man sighed and turned back to his console. "We're the planet's premiere aerospace manufacturers and private military contractors," Cyning said, as if that explained it. "Staas Company and the United Nations are far closer friends than anyone ever wants to believe."

  *

  The open bay doors looked out on the breaching ship and Guerrero beyond her. Captain Chun was waiting in his white exosuit alongside his shuttle with two aides and six UN Marines inside.

  "We're taking a Staas Company longboat," Ram told him. "Leave the Marines and the aides behind. It's just going to be you and me and Mr. Cyning. And that thing." He thumbed over his shoulder to where the two-legged bot trundled behind him like half a fat child. "Translator."

  "What we say over local comms," Cyning explained, "it codes into protocol and translates through the conceptual matrix. It transmits and receives in atmospheric audio, RF, and IR. What it gets from the Shediri, it encodes and translates for us and vice versa." The company man scrolled through menus of pre-compiled phrases as he walked. "I am the Human in charge." Cyning stabbed the imaginary display he saw in front of him, and the Shediri translation filled their helmets, a din of tonal hiss and rhythmic clicks and whine.

  Captain Chun appeared to grimace at the sound, but Ram thought it was the meaning of the words that irked him.

  With none of his officers aboard, Devlin finally got to fly his own longboat. "Hardway longboat six requests clearance."

  Pardue's voice responded over comms. "The sky is yours, six."

  'Above', the fighters of Pardue's CAP hovered around the carrier with her junks and 180 warspite torpedoes pointed at the alien station. As the longboat ascended up from the bay, he saw the barrels of their railguns and mighty Guerrero aimed that way, too. The entirety of the teardrop mountain of armor and guns seemed pointed at the heart of the clustered station. No doubt similar destruction was aimed at the task force right now.

  Anton Cyning said, "Follow the trail to where it ends, Devlin. There...where that small craft has landed."

  2Ks out, he picked his landing spot. There was a kind of 'overhanging' eave where the fringe of the smaller docks intersected the meandering cluster of the section on which they would set down.

  Captain Chun said it this time. "They already had a brilliant chance to ambush us with a swarm of warheads. They didn't take it." Ram repeated that to himself in his head. He wanted to believe these aliens would be allies. With their help as intermediaries, maybe they could get Taipan back.

  The longboat had LiDAR and radar for range finding, but with no known objects for scale, Ram's eye got fooled during the landing. The hex pattern covering the pad came up at him faster than he thought it would. He hit hard and jerked them against their straps as he bounced the longboat once. "Sorry. We're down. It's .22 gees of local artificial gravity here." Out the cockpit canopy, the intersecting curves of the alien station's architecture rose and receded above them. The edge of the pads was only thirty meters off. "Setting reactor to idle. Standby pressure on nacelles."

  "I'll go first out the airlock," Cyning said. The two of you can fight over who goes second."

  Cyning, Devlin, and Chun stepped out the side airlocks of the longboat. With the nacelles' plasma pressure set to standby levels, the cooling ionized gas puffed out of them like a hot fog.

  The craft that had led them here was forty meters away on the landing pads. His suit measured its length at 29 meters and change. Under the stripes and jagged angles of its warpaint, what appeared to be only light armor plates covered the stub wings and the main hull. The Sky Jacks could tear through that armor in a heartbeat. The paint made it look primitive, but he reminded himself he still didn't know where its engines were and their missiles had sneaked up on the task force without too much trouble at all.

  "Movement," Chun said over local comms. "The door." The translator bot that had followed them out of the lock and struggled to keep up repeated it over the diplomatic channel. It filled their helmets with clicking and hiss.

  What had looked like a kind of round portal with a flush-fitting hatch, Ram now saw was a sort of iris. It rotated and opened to reveal no light his natural eyes could see, but a Standard Staas exosuit helmet included a transducer set for infrared, and when he looked in that wavelength, he could make out figures in the dim - standing... moving... like giant, semi-erect earwigs.

  The portal expanded to over ten meters width, large enough that the creatures that came forward out of the station's interior 'walked' two abreast and still had meters between them. Their armored, articulated exosuits seemed so complex and impractical, he assumed the design had to be following the shape of the thing beneath it. The suits, too, were painted in that alien warpaint. Four insectile legs supported the 'bottom' segment of its body. It was like an earwig, but the rest of it bent to vertical so it stood erect. Its armor was segmented. The domed elements like helmets on top were opaque to all the spectra in which Ram and his suit could see. The swirling colors of the banded gas giant reflected off them as they came on twitching legs with quick, seemingly impulsive, motions.

  The creatures ceased their advance once they'd all cleared the door and turned to face inwards making the sort of corridor that he'd seen honor guards make for VIPs on Earth. What emerged from the near-infrared dim interior of the station looked similar to the other creatures, but was not exactly the same. It was slower. It walked on what looked to be at least sixty implausibly short legs set under it like a millipede. That one had a helmet you could see through. It had muddy rose translucent skin, green veins, and a multitude of compound eyes full of black, shiny hexagons.

  Only the seemingly decorative headgear this VIP wore bore the warpaint dazzle pattern covering the warships and the soldiers' armor. That headgear curved up behind its helmet making it appear taller than its escorts.

  It took almost a full minute for that thing to make its way down the two rows of soldier bugs. It settled only a few meters beyond them and folded the six, jointed appendages of its upper body.

  That's when Anton Cyning stepped forward one pace. The translation bot trundled a meter in front of him and stopped. The company man said, "I am the Human in charge."

  It took only a second for the reply and the translation into hiss and click. They heard it on comms. The alien answered over the same channel, and the bot translated in its thin, male voice.

  "We are Hive Hrt'ee. Action is truth."

  "Shediri attacked us," Cyning said. "Why?"

  "Hive Regent Kesik attack. Kesik Imperium loyal."

  "And you?"

  "Hive Hrt'ee embraces change. Embraces Shediri liberty. Embraces Human."

  It was this thing that had invited them, Ram thought. It was this rebel hive living like an outcast in the gas giant moons, away from the homeworld that had brought them to this system. It sent Taipan to Shedir 4 where it wasn't wanted to start a conflict with the Hive Regent. And you could just bet Anton Cyning was part of it.

  Cyning said, "Our people are prisoners of Hive Regent Kesik. Help us."

  "Help is conditional," it said.

  "On what?"

  "Humans defeat Imperium ship." One of the representative’s upper appendages pointed at the system's star, Shedir.

  Ram's scalp tingled under his helmet when he saw that. He'd said the Imperium ship would find them. Maybe it already had. "Hardway this is Devlin. Train the carrier's arrays on Shedir. Look for any sign of an Imperium ship lurking in the stellar atmo.
"

  "This is Biko. We're on it."

  The Shediri representative continued. "If Human defeat Imperium ship, then allies. Allies together defeat Hive Regent Kesik. New Hive Regent Hrt'ee will return Taipan prisoners." First, Ram thought, it wanted to see them defeat the Imperium ship and then, it wanted their help with a coup. "Hive Hrt'ee (future modifier) only Hive," it said. Genocide was on the menu quite possibly.

  "Refuse this coup, Mr. Cyning," Captain Chun warned him on a private channel.

  Ram said, "If you make this deal, Mr. Cyning, then our other neighbors will never trust us."

  Both sides were moving forward into this agreement without any hesitation as if it had been pre-negotiated somehow. If Ram was right about this and it was all part of a plan the company man and Hrt'ee had arranged, then Cyning would now accept the Hive Hrt'ee's offer if Ram didn't quickly find a wrench to throw into the works.

  The only weapon he had was the truth so he tried to use it. "We Humans cannot defeat the Imperium ship. Its shield is too powerful."

  Anton Cyning could do little but glare at him wide-eyed and shake his head in disbelief while the translator bot spit out the words in hiss and click.

  The Shediri twitched and didn't say anything at that point. Ram didn't know where that left them until the VIP bug minced aside on its tiny legs. It turned perpendicular and stepped back to allow four more earwig-like worker bugs wearing plain suits to come out from inside carrying something that looked familiar.

  "That's an inertial negation pinch from the guts of a UN frigate," Captain Chun said. Ram zoomed in on the frame markings right away using his helmet. "UNS 3723...This is the pinch from UNS Mako. She went missing weeks ago."

  "Imperium defeat UNS 3723," the Shediri said through the translator.

  The length of the pinch's field core had been stripped and reformed in a new shape unlike anything Ram had ever seen. The whole coil set had been replaced with what appeared to be some kind of braided metal formed like coral. He suit couldn't make any sense of the faint light coming off it.

  The worker bugs turned it round before they set it down. Capping the tip of it was what looked like a secondary, rotating field emitter. Because of its shape, it seemed to actually change its form as it spun, but Ram thought it must be an illusion of some kind.

  "Hive Hrt'ee to Human. Gift."

  Cyning said, "I don't understand."

  "Hive Hrt'ee to Human. Gift. Conditional allies."

  "Thank you," Cyning said. His eyes sparkled now. "Conditional allies. Agreed."

  "Action is truth," Hive Hrt'ee's representative withdrew then, followed by the pale-suited workers and its soldiers in their painted armor. As the bugs skittered off, Ram suspected Anton Cyning had been here to visit once before. No trust-building had been required at this meeting. A whole set of secret negotiations between Cyning and this rebel Hive must have already taken place to pave the way for this alliance and this coup.

  Captain Chun's inscrutable face evidenced nothing, but the UN captain could see what Ram could. Ram thought Chun must be feeling even more outrage at what was happening than he did because if the Secretary General had agreed to put Anton Cyning in charge of negotiations in the event of the envoy's death, then this planned coup was clearly happening with his UN superiors' consent. This regime change was as much the UN's will as Staas Company's.

  Ram had always known exactly what Staas Company was; he'd never trusted them. But it was different for Chun. Chun had believed in the UN as a force for civilization. You can't climb as high as he had in that Navy without believing in it. Ram couldn't easily imagine the betrayal Chun must be feeling right now.

  Captain Chun bored a hole through the company man's helmet with his eyes while his hand rested near his sidearm like he wanted to use it.

  Anton Cyning didn't seem to notice or care. When the last of the Shediri had gone and they were alone again, Cyning turned to face Devlin and Chun. He grinned and his helmet lights shone off his polished skin. "I think that meeting went splendidly, don't you?"

  8

  SCS Taipan

  She felt the small detonations, but Captain Sellis didn't know what had happened until the runner found her at the starboard barricade on B-deck. The railgunner who brought the news breathed so much condensation on her visor that Dana couldn't see her below her nose at first. The eyes said it was good news.

  "Captain! We captured one!" When she shined her helmet lights the runner's way, she could discern the grin on her crewman's face. "We got one of them alive. A whole squad of 'em gambled they could come up through the deck from the mess hall without us being wise, but the Commodore's wife spotted 'em coming. Once the deck dropped out from the middle of the compartment they jumped up like giant grasshoppers and we got 'em in a ten gun crossfire. Most fell back through and then we fragged them, but we got to keep a live one. Mostly alive, anyway."

  It took her less than a minute to get there. She ran out of the B-deck ring and into the tank room where the two-meter, hot-edged hole steamed in the deck from the water running over it. "Tanks got shot up, sorry." Marnes said, "We didn't hit the H3 tanks." The H3 tanks were on the other side and the two squads she saw on either side of the compartment had peppered the water tanks instead when their crossfire shredded the aliens.

  Parts of the Shediri soldiers were strewn at the edges of the open section between the tanks that hadn't dropped through to the deck below. The black and white, dazzle painted limbs twitched with residual nervous system impulses, one of them with a weapon still in its insectile half-claws. "Secure that."

  "Most of the bodies fell back down the hole," Marnes said. He pulled an egg-sized grenade from the thigh pocket of his exosuit. "Grenade out!" He twisted the halves in opposite directions and tossed it down the hole. The explosion threw bug parts up from below.

  "Where are the prisoners?" The hissing and clacking she now heard coming out the exosuit speakers of a Shediri soldier didn't come from down there. The alien sounds came from the back of the compartment, back between the H3 tanks against the aft-most bulkhead.

  "It's restrained," Marnes said, but Dana was already following the sound, and when she saw Margo Devlin, she knew something bad was happening.

  It had barely been five minutes since it had been captured and somehow, Ram's wife had gotten Ostrow and Stefani to turn their backs and not watch what was happening. They spun around the second they saw Dana.

  The redsuits had bound the Shediri in holene forming tape. After it expanded, the thing was half cocooned in a shell of 3cm-thick plastic around its upper and lower limbs. Over it, stood the boy.

  Devlin's eight-year-old son had that plasma blade in his hand. The back half of the 15 cm, magnetically focused blade of thirteen-thousand degree plasma glowed bright and lit his face through his little helmet. The front half of it was producing smoke and sparks and little plasmoid spheres that skated across the Shediri's domed helmet as he drilled a hole in it. Flame licked out along with little puffs of neon all aglow with charge from the blade.

  "Tell us why," the boy said, staring with narrowed eyes into his own warped reflection in the Shediri's burning helmet. "Why did you do it?"

  "What the hell are you doing?" She lunged forward to cross the meters between them as the hissing and clicking started again from the alien's suit speaker. Then, she saw the two-legged translator standing next to little Hank Devlin. As he tortured the Shediri it heard what the bug said out its suit speaker.

  The thin, male voice translated, "You. Invader. Invader. Die. Die."

  She thought the boy tried to finish it then. He tried to plunge the plasma blade into the alien's helmet as deeply as it could go, but Dana clamped her hand on his wrist before he could do it.

  "Ostrow, Stefani..." She didn't even know what to say to them. "Go... go guard the hole." When they were gone, her first impulse was to set Ram's wife on fire with her rifle for allowing what she'd just seen. "Explain this, Mrs. Devlin."

  "I want to know why," the bo
y said, now standing beside his mother.

  "So curious at that age," Margo said.

  "I want to know why." He stamped once. "Don't you want to know why, Captain Sellis? Why did they invite us here and then attack us? It's not fair that we don't know why. If we're going to die, I mean."

  "It is a reasonable question, you must admit," Margo said.

  "You're both insane."

  "The boy was just trying to put other translator bot to good use."

  She glanced from one to the other in shock. "I'm locking both of you up."

  "Captain! Come quick!" It was Marnes. "Bring the translator bot! Hurry!"

  "Send two back to guard the prisoner," she said, "I'm coming."

  When she got within a few meters of the edge of the hole, Marnes waved her forward slowly, pointing, indicating that she should peek over the lip, down to the deck below.

  The sound of just one of them came up to her from below then. It was the same pattern of clacking hiss and click, repeating over and over. The translator bot finally caught up on its short legs and compared what it heard to the conceptual language matrix. "Surrender," it said with careful neutrality. "Surrender now."

  9

  SCS Hardway

  Maintenance Bay Two

  While the task force held station in the gas giant's moons, Ram Devlin sent the alien modified pinch to the man on his carrier most likely to be able to tell him what he could do with it. An hour later, the redsuit called them down for a demonstration. Devlin, Captain Chun, Cyning, and Asa Biko entered MBay 2 together, where the three-meter, alien-modified device floated high over the deck on a grav-pad.

  "Tig Meester, what can you tell me?" Ram said, "What do you know?"

  "We're just about to turn it on with proper power."

  Meester's redsuit crew were all over it affecting adjustments to the three-meter coil set and that made Devlin nervous. "You know what you're doing, Tig?"