The members of FJ One were silent and grim. They’d survived the Rhalbazani ship’s surprise attack on the
Fallschirmjäger
forces on Eden One, and even managed to destroy the enemy’s craft, although at great cost. After which, the remaining forces dispersed across Earth’s colonies to regroup.

All except FJ One, under the leadership of Captain – now General – Dieter Chen. In the aftermath of battle, the Rhal had sent bots to salvage the remains of their ship. FJ One had floated their shuttle into the proximity of one of the Rhalbazani “daddy longlegs” transport spiders, and they’d been scooped up along with all the other space junk from the wreckage of the Rhalbazani blimp.

The transport spider’s software was clearly agnostic about its freight – if it was shiny and metal, pick it up. Then it had shot into whatever the Rhal version of flashspace was, carrying them into enemy territory.

There was no way to know how long it would take to get to their destination. The Rhal ships that had swept down on Earth had moved across the galaxy at astonishing speeds, inspiring shock and awe. But it was unlikely, in Chen’s estimation, that junk haulers would move as quickly.

And that gave the members of FJ One little to do other than wait, and think about the comrades, the friends, they’d just lost. Almost all of the
Fallschirmjäger
had been wiped out in a single assault – five hundred and forty of humanity’s most physically and intellectually powerful and agile men and women, leaving only sixty to carry on the fight against humanity’s enemy. How do you mourn that? How do you manage to give each one the memorial, the remembrance, they deserve?

Dieter Chen often chided himself for going into “Spock” mode. Analytical, goal-oriented, process-oriented. He could “go native,” mix with native populations and speak their language and roar and sing and drink with the best, but it was…his job.

For centuries, Special Forces members had been chosen for their social, outgoing natures. Population-centric counterinsurgency required the kind of people who were naturals at building relationships, at forming social bonds. No lone wolves.

And yet, here he was. He’d been Huizhong McAllister’s first recruit,
Fallschirmjäger
member #1. And she’d known from the day she pulled him from a detention facility that he wasn’t the stuff of which traditional Special Forces teams were made.

Maybe
, he thought grimly,
she made a mistake there. Because at times like this, the last thing these people needed was Mr. Fucking Spock.

He cleared his throat, and they looked at him, waiting for the words he’d say, the beginning of the healing process.

“I…”

“We’re out,” Archambault said. The video panels went from opaque to black, the cameras and sensors in “caution mode” in case they’d come into a sensory overload scenario. In a few seconds they adjusted to the starry environs.

The spider was moving towards what looked from this distance like a wasp’s nest, a tapered oval, at the bottom of which little things flew in and out like insects. As they got closer, they could see it was a station of some sort. The very top of the oval was a flat platform, probably about five hundred meters in diameter. It was covered in red circles, landing pads obviously, since their spider landed on an open one.

It released its payload and the team was jolted as dozens of arms reached out of the landing pad to grab the deliveries. Their shuttle smacked against the surface as the arms hauled them in – no need for smooth, gentle motions, after all, with scrap metal.

“What’s the situation?” Chen said.

Kaplan moved the camera to the left. “Take a look at the next pad over.”

Heavy equipment was slicing and dicing the scraps on that pad. They were the sort of robots you’d seen in a factory, mechanical arms that looked like cranes on rolling platforms. Only where factory robots might have a single task, each of these arms had multiple tools at their ends – a claw to grab a hunk of junk and lift and turn it, a cutting laser beam to precisely chop out whatever was of value, another with a more hand-like gripper, with “fingers” to extract the useful bits, and one that looked like an etching laser, marking the salvage with the Rhal version of a bar code.

When the piece was carved and coded, the arm would let it go, and a spider of the appropriate size would snatch it up, and head to the mouth of the hive.

“Oh shit…” Archambault gasped.

The team watched as one of the arms grabbed…a
Fallschirmjäger
shuttle. One wing was blasted off, and the nose was shredded. The arms paused. This was no Rhal ship, so they had no model for reusing whatever was in it. The Rhal AI that controlled the system took entire seconds to analyze it and decide what to do.

The arm clamped the shuttle. The cutting laser sliced the ship in two, straight down the middle as easily as if it were a loaf of bread. General Chen’s stomach turned as the fingers began extracting human bodies and hurling them into space – useless, unrecyclable organic matter.

He could read the number on the shuttle – FJ Twenty One, Captain Dorotskar’s team.

“Godspeed,” he whispered, not a prayer but a tribute, a remembrance of a famous quote from the early days of space travel.

“Godspeed,” the rest of the team affirmed.

The shuttle was quickly disassembled, its electronics hurled into space, useless to the highly advanced Rhal. But the hull was gathered up and swept into the hive.

Chen tried to focus on the task, the data. Were the Rhal so pressed for resources that they needed to reclaim this much junk? Were they some kind of environmentally responsible Empire? History made that sound unlikely.

“Okay,” he said. “We need to get out of here before we get opened like a can of tuna.”

“Of what?” Marcus asked, confused.

“Right, sorry.” He’d forgotten there hadn’t been such as thing as tuna in a century. “I need ideas. What’s the sitrep?”

They shook themselves, their training kicking in. Cruz looked at a screen. “I don’t see anything that looks armed, no perimeter defenses, no fighters. It’s a junkyard. Fully automated from the looks of it.”

Kaplan nodded. “There’s no expectation that anyone would want to steal any of this.”

“Or that they could get this far into Rhal space, anyway,” Archambault added.

The general nodded. “What if we get out of these grapples and just…take off?”

Kaplan shook his head. “The mechs look to be programmed to detect movement, and pull back in anything that starts drifting away.”

“So…what if we punched it?” Cruz suggested. “Just rocket out of here before they could move?”

“Always with the forceful solution,” Hewitt said with a grin, and the team laughed. The atmosphere changed with that, and Chen realized he’d been breathing shallowly, his chest tight. The tension lifted enough, anyway, so he could think clearly.

“Okay. Sounds like a plan. Do we have the thrust to just break free and…”

Marcus raised his hand. Chen smiled. “This isn’t school, Private. Just chime in.” Like its historical antecedents, the FJ forces weren’t much on conventional military protocol, especially in strategy sessions.

“Sir, we need some Rhal tech. If we’re going to fight them, we need to learn their language, their systems. This is a golden opportunity to harvest it, because there must be a ton of it around here.”

He pointed at the screen. “Over there, there’s one of their fighters. It’s got a hole blown through its rear engine by a kamikaze droid, but otherwise intact. If I can extract the onboard computer...”

“Good idea,” Chen said, and the young man beamed.
Jesus, how old was he?
Chen thought.
Nineteen?
But clearly, he was already a useful addition to the team.

He weight the risk/reward balance. They were flying blind in Rhal space, in almost every sense. All he had was the coordinates HM had left him for “Planet Alex.” They knew next to nothing about the enemy’s capabilities other than what they’d seen at Eden One. They didn’t know the Rhal language, their mentality, their history, their culture…all the things that advance FJ teams would spend years studying from space before they landed on a new colony planet and made contact with the natives.

“We’d need some kind of Rosetta Stone to even begin to understand the language, never mind the tech,” he said. “But you’re right. When will we ever have a better chance to start on that? If, that is, this place is as undefended as we think. We’ve made no aggressive or intrusive actions so far.”

“I’m getting all warm inside just thinking about putting my hands on a Rhal comm system,” Archambault said. “Don’t deny me.”

Chen chuckled. “Okay. Time for a space walk. Everyone suit up, in case something happens and we lose atmosphere. Marcus, Cruz, Kaplan, you’re up.”

Kaplan looked dubiously at Marcus. “No offense, chief, but the kid’s a newbie and…”

“And it’s his idea. And as we learned on Tiamat, he’s pretty clever.” Marcus was embarrassed – he’d been on the wrong side of the conflict on Tiamat, but FJ One was nothing if not pragmatic, and his value was indisputably too great to add him to those transported to Eden One.

“Don’t provoke the bots. If they try and recycle you, do what you can to disable them without attracting too much attention.”

They all suited up, and the three men went out the airlock. Cruz carried a pair of bolt cutters and a handgun, Kaplan had a laser torch, and Marcus a toolkit. They’d inserted light magnet modules into their boots to give them just enough adhesion to the surface, but not enough to stop them from moving fast in any direction, including up, if they had to.

“If you fire that gun,” Marcus asked, “won’t the recoil blow you into space?”

“No,” Cruz said. “Most of the kinetic energy is in the bullet. I may spin a bit but that’s it.”

While they made their way slowly across the platform to the circle with the Rhal fighter, Chen put his team’s collective mind to work.

“Look around. What do we see here?”

Kaplan thought about it. “Our own shuttles. Some of their fighters. Bits of the blimp. Some forms I don’t recognize being taken apart over there to the right.”

“Any weapons damage?”

“Yeah…there is. But whatever that is, it wasn’t at Eden One.”

“Could it be non-Rhal?”

“Could be.”

“That means we may not be the only ones capable of attacking a Rhal ship,” Archambault surmised.

That lifted everyone’s spirits, the possibility that the Rhal weren’t the only other spacefaring people around here.

“Maybe they have hostile neighbors,” Chen thought out loud. “Maybe some of their attempted conquests didn’t go well. Maybe there are still allies we can make.”

“Or we could end up waving and saying hello to an Idiran Empire,” Kaplan said, referencing the legendary Iain M. Banks novels.

“Or it could be the Culture,” Marcus said. “You never know.”

“Ahh,” Kaplan smiled, “a civilized person at last. And your favorite Culture novel, young man?”

“
Excession
. It spends the most time with the Culture ships.”

“Good choice.”

“‘Getting to know you, getting to know all about you…’” Cruz hummed, half mockingly.

The team laughed, and Chen smiled. “How are you doing out there, Marcus?”

The three men were halfway to the next circle, walking tentatively, not wanting to provoke either the swinging arms or the claws that had popped out of the surface to hold the shuttle. Chen knew there was little as unnerving as your first spacewalk.

“I’m fine, sir. I just want to…grab everything here and study it. Their level of tech is…I mean, wow,” he said, raising his arms emphatically.

That was a mistake. The motion caught the attention of an arm that swung around from the periphery of their target circle and snatched Marcus up in its fingered claw.

“Oh shit!” Marcus shouted.

“I’m on it,” Cruz said, flipping into Weapons Sergeant mode. He squatted and jumped, hurling himself after the arm as it wheeled to take Marcus to the platform for analysis and dissection. Kaplan was right behind him.

For a moment, it looked like Cruz would miss his target, and go hurtling into space…or become the object of another arm’s attention. He slammed into the giant arm with an “Oof,” his torso taking the brunt of the impact. Kaplan was right behind him, and Cruz held out a hand to pull him in as he nearly sailed under the arm.

The arm held Marcus still while it tried to figure out if he was animal, mineral or vegetable, so to speak.

“Right there,” Marcus said, with uncanny presence of mind. “At the elbow, there’s some cabling.”

Cruz had his bolt cutters magnetized to the back of his suit, and he reached back and yanked them off. He could just get them around the thick cable.

“Little help,” he said, and Kaplan put his own hands over Cruz’s and together they squeezed with all their might.

The cable snapped, sparks flying, and the arm went dead, releasing Marcus. Marcus pushed off it towards the platform, his boots sticking him to the surface.

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