Pathfinder
stepped through to within half a light minute of SkySpy’s Lifeboat B – an impressive piece of navigation and guesswork as to the lifeboat’s precise position. The cries of joy over the radio as
Pathfinder
closed the gap suggested that the survivors of SkySpy were glad to see them. It didn’t last.
‘You’re
not
taking us back to the Roving?’ Lifeboat pilot Albarazi looked around the wardroom as if trying to find sympathy on one of the faces: McLaughlin, Bill Perry, Donna McCallum and Sand Strong, senior of the First Breed on
Pathfinder
. The decision-makers for the SkySpy mission. Around the edges of the room stood Gilmore and the rest of the observers. Some were taking notes, many were leaning forward to catch every word. Gilmore tried to keep his own face impassive. ‘We hoped . . .’
‘No, son, we’re off to SkySpy,’ McLaughlin said.
‘We’ve been on board for days.’
‘Son, you’re almost at the generator anyway. And we have to find out—’
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Albarazi sounded desperate. ‘The XCs showed us no mercy. They tunnelled in, BEN JEAPES thousands of them, and . . . they’re animals, sir!’ He leaned forward. ‘Trust me, sir. Everyone left behind is dead. Everyone. They won’t have—’
Gilmore spoke for the first time. ‘The report you beamed ahead said Lieutenant Gilmore and—’ he checked his aide – ‘Boon Round of the First Breed got off the lifeboat and re-entered SkySpy.’ McLaughlin shot him an annoyed look but kept quiet.
‘Well, trust me, they’re dead too,’ Albarazi said. Gilmore hadn’t been introduced and it seemed Albarazi didn’t recognize him. ‘The XCs won’t have spared them, bloody idiots.’
Gilmore raged. ‘Did you see them die?’ he shouted.
‘Um, no, sir . . .’
‘Then we’ll make our own minds up,’ McLaughlin said, with a warning glance at Gilmore. Gilmore subsided in a fit of trembling that he fought to control.
‘Why did they get off?’ Donna McCallum spoke up.
‘To make sure the banks had been destroyed.’ Albarazi sounded surprised she should ask.
‘Wouldn’t you say that was the right thing to do?’ She was presumably speaking to Albarazi but Gilmore could have sworn she glanced at Perry.
‘Well, technically . . .’
‘Mr Albarazi,’ McLaughlin said, breaking into a rising level of tension, ‘I’ll want a full copy of the lifeboat’s log and your personal report.’
‘You’ve already got them, sir. Nothing’s changed since I beamed the first report through to the Roving.’
‘Better and better. What’s your supply situation?’
‘Supplies? No problem,’ Albarazi said.
‘Damage?’
‘We took some hits but we’ve patched them up.’
‘Is there anything to stop you getting safely back home as you are?’
Albarazi finally took the hint that the crew of the lifeboat weren’t about to transfer to
Pathfinder
.
‘No, sir,’ he said sullenly.
‘Then that’s dandy. Our people will check you over but then you’re on your own again till you get home. Captain Perry, do you require any further information?’
Perry looked up from the notes he was making on his aide. ‘I’d appreciate a look at the log and the report, sir, but no further questions here.’
‘Fine. Mr Albarazi will be escorted back to the lifeboat and we’ll open our sealed orders.’ McLaughlin looked apologetically around at the observers, but spoke in the general direction of Gilmore. ‘And we’ll be doing that on our own.’
‘Commodore?’
Gilmore stopped in the passageway and looked around. ‘That’s Mr Gilmore,’ he said, ‘as your superior likes to point out. Um –’
well
, he thought,
while she’s here
– ‘that point you made about my son . . . thank you.’
Donna McCallum looked abashed. ‘I just thought it needed saying,’ she said. ‘I’d be proud of him.’
Gilmore really didn’t need advice on paternal feelings and his gratitude only stretched so far. ‘I’ve been proud of him for a long time,’ he said shortly. He might screw up everything else but he could at least
feel
properly. ‘Anything else I can do for you, Lieutenant?’
She’s only trying to be friendly
, said a little voice inside him, but he told it to shut up.
She flushed. ‘No, sir. Nothing else. Sorry to have bothered you.’ She turned and marched down the passageway, and Gilmore stared after her in frank bewilderment.
Andrew McLaughlin, Bill Perry and Sand Strong were left together in the wardroom, their aides on the table in front of them. Statistics extracted from the lifeboat log flashed in front of them.
‘Thousands of ’em.’ McLaughlin was derisive as he recalled Albarazi’s assessment of the attacking force. ‘A couple of hundred, tops.’
‘True.’ Sand Strong looked up from the display. ‘But they have had two weeks to bring in reinforcements by more conventional means. Big ships, uncamouflaged.’
‘SkySpy would have noticed a large force building up and there’s nothing here to suggest it did. Assuming this is a reasonably accurate assessment of big ship deployment at the time of attack . . . there’s no more than two or three at the most that could have got out to SkySpy orbit in the time they’ve had. Assume three ships, assume max crews of two hundred and a further, oh, one hundred fighting force equivalent to your marines on each . . .’
‘Six hundred crew, occupying force of three hundred on the rock,’ Perry said. ‘But that’s still a lot for my sixty marines to contend with. And three ships could have a lot of firepower.’
‘Even so. SkySpy’s a big place, it’s unpowered, they don’t know the layout; if I were them I’d be paranoid about booby traps so I’d be proceeding slowly and our assessment of numbers is probably way on the generous side. I doubt there’s that many and I doubt they’ve secured half of it.’
‘So we take the other half, sir?’
‘Possibly.’ McLaughlin drummed his fingers twice on the table and looked Perry in the eyes. ‘Activate log, input audio. Captain Perry, is it your opinion that we have gained as accurate an assessment of the situation on SkySpy as we are able from available data?’
‘I suppose so. Yes, sir.’
‘Sand Strong?’
‘I concur,’ the Rustie said.
‘Then we open our orders.’ McLaughlin took a small box from his pocket, put it on the tabletop, opened it. Two data crystals. He inserted the one with a ‘priority’ tag into his aide. ‘Copy to aide of Captain Perry and console of Sand Strong file “SO1”, authorization my voice print.’
‘
Order executed
,’ said his aide.
‘File SO1 and duplicate files SO1, open,’ McLaughlin said, and their orders appeared on the displays.
The two men and the Rustie were quiet for a moment as their eyes scanned the text. Then Perry whistled.
‘Paragraph three?’ Sand Strong said. Perry nodded.
‘Keep going, son,’ said McLaughlin. ‘It
really
gets interesting further on.’
Ten
Day Eighteen: 20 June 2153
One moment there was nothing beyond the asteroid but black space pricked with a million little points of light. Barabadar was pulling herself down the line that connected her ship and the rock, and then a sphere of nothingness blossomed out of the nothing beyond the asteroid. It was like a mouth opening in the fabric of space itself.
Voices were already shouting in her earphones and battle hormones flooded into her system.
This is it!
The thought was intoxicating, and here she was halfway between either of the places she could actually do some good. She quickly began to climb back up the line, never taking her eyes off the sphere. It hurt the eyes to look at it; they registered
something
and yet there was nothing there to register. It might be very large and thousands of miles away, or much smaller and right in front of her eyes.
Then a cluster of small objects shot out of it. The sphere vanished behind them and Barabadar’s immediate thought was,
Missile attack!
‘Take countermeasures,’ she said, but even as she did she saw she was mistaken. They weren’t aimed at the asteroid, they were bracketing it on all sides. Barabadar’s suit reported it was unable to get a lock on any of them and so it was impossible to tell how far away they were, but her hunter’s eyes had already made the calculation. Perhaps a mile away but on a course that would take them past the rock. Definitely not an attack.
But one of them was heading directly towards her ship. The defences automatically opened up and fiery plasma erupted all around the intruder. It swerved –
swerved
, Barabadar noted – to dodge the gunfire and carried on. The ship’s guns reacquired it, someone with initiative predicted its course and aimed slightly ahead. The gunfire connected and it vanished in an explosion of debris.
The others remained and a small nuclear burst from a torpedo flashed next to one. It began to spin, its system disabled by the electromagnetic pulse, and laser fire converged on it, tearing it to shreds.
‘No nuclear torpedoes!’ Barabadar shouted. ‘There are unshielded personnel in the vicinity including me!’
Now the probes were abreast of the rock but showing no sign of changing course, apart from dodging the fire of the other ships.
‘
My Mother
.’ First Son, on her ship, spoke in her earphones. ‘
They’re sending out signals. They’re spying
on us
.’
Of course they are, idiot
. It was what Barabadar would do herself if she was in the position of the coming outlander commander: first get intelligence, and use unmanned probes to do it. And if you could open holes in space, intelligence-gathering entered a whole new dimension.
Every fighting instinct screamed at her to let loose with everything she had against the enemy and she had to remind herself angrily that she
wanted
the outlanders to come. And she wanted them to come peacefully. She didn’t want to provoke them and bring their anger down on Homeworld.
But she did want to challenge them to the Ritual of Contested Land –
this
battle with the extraterrestrials would be done properly – and there was no point in making their lives too easy.
‘Jam them,’ she ordered. The probes were over the rock’s horizon, heading towards the sun, and Barabadar could no longer see them. ‘Relay radar image to my suit,’ she said, and the picture appeared in her mid-vision. ‘All guns, plot the convergence of their trajectories and target. Fire on my command.’
The probes had come out of that sphere thing and then moved apart. So, if they were going to be picked up again, they would presumably go back through another sphere, which would mean moving back together . . .
Sure enough, they were converging, and then another sphere opened in space in front of them.
‘Fire!’
Most of the probes exploded in balls of flaming gas and fragments and only one made it into the sphere just before it closed up again. It had taken just seconds, but the battle had begun and Barabadar felt herself charged, ready for action. It would be good.
‘All ships and soldiers to battle stations,’ Barabadar said. ‘First Son, I’m coming back up.’
The observers sat around the table in the granny annex and waited. Every now and then someone would open their mouth as if to say something like, ‘Surely it must have happened by now,’ but the hostile glares from their neighbours would make them stop before they started.
Michael Gilmore willed his fingers to stop drumming on the chair arm. The nervous twitch transferred itself to his left leg, and to keep that still he started drumming his fingers again.
Pathfinder
had moved forward a mile and opened another step-through point. The surviving probe had shot out into space and the point closed behind it. Data had flooded into
Pathfinder
’s computers. Now it just needed sorting out, tabulating, classifying . . . and acting upon.
The hatch opened and Andrew McLaughlin ducked into the cabin.
‘I wanted to say this personally,’ he said. His face was impassive and he wasn’t meeting anyone’s gaze as he held up his aide. ‘OK, from the top. All but one of the probes were destroyed. The surviving probe received response to its hails from thirty-eight translator units and twenty-five aides, all in standby mode. It did not receive responses from the translator unit of Boon Round of the First Breed or the aide of Lieutenant Joel Gilmore. Add that to the fact that Lifeboat A didn’t respond either . . .’
McLaughlin stopped, looked up and grinned at Gilmore. ‘I think we can assume they got away. Congratulations, Mike.’
It was as if a mighty pressure he hadn’t known was there burst inside him, and relief flooded throughout his system. Gilmore realized to his horror that his eyes might be blurring and he blinked once, hard, to stop them. He didn’t dare meet anyone’s gaze but he heard a murmur going around the table, a pleased mumble from those observers who actually cared.
Rhukaya Bakan was holding out a hand. He took it and shook, and looked up into her smiling eyes.
‘I’m very happy for you,’ she said, and sounded it.
‘In terms of alien presence,’ McLaughlin said, ‘probe detected three ships matching the description of the kind that attacked SkySpy, and two larger, conventional vessels.’
‘So, what next?’ said the observer for the South American Combine, who obviously couldn’t care less about Joel.
‘Since Lieutenant Gilmore and Boon Round aren’t being held on SkySpy, so far as we can tell, that gives us more freedom of action. We still need to ascertain that the memory banks were destroyed and there’s equipment on SkySpy that needs retrieving.’ Gilmore brought his head up suddenly at the latter announcement, and it was noticeable – to him – that McLaughlin wasn’t looking at him any more. ‘So,’ McLaughlin finished, ‘we send in the marines.’
‘Action!’ said the Slavic Commonwealth observer. She seemed to approve.
‘What equipment?’ Gilmore said, and the pained look on McLaughlin’s face almost made him regret asking.
I have to treat you like one of the others and there
may be areas I just can’t let you in
. . .
‘Equipment vital to the interests of the Commonwealth, Mr Gilmore.’
‘What equipment?’ said Bakan.
‘The precise details are restricted to the higher levels of the Navy, ma’am.’
‘Since when?’ Gilmore demanded. He knew the SkySpy protocols inside out. The Commonwealth’s greatest fear was that the XCs would discover step-through, and there was nothing on SkySpy that was going to help them.
‘Since Admiral Chase said so.’
‘Oh bloody hell, Andy . . .’ Gilmore burst out, feeling sudden panic that there
was
something on SkySpy, something he should have known about . . .
But no, there was nothing. He’d swear to it.
Nothing
.
‘I’m sorry.’ McLaughlin touched his hand to his forehead in a vague salute. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll shortly be entering a likely combat zone. All internal modules on
Pathfinder
will be sealed off, this one too. Please do not attempt to leave and do obey any instructions from the flight deck immediately. We’ll keep the datastream coming so that you can continue to observe from here. That’s all.’ And he was gone.
‘I thought ships depressurized for combat?’ The European observer was looking at Gilmore as the obviously available authority on spacecraft.
‘We did in the old days,’ Gilmore muttered. His head was in his hands and he was staring at the table top.
The old days; like five years ago, when I helped save
McLaughlin’s ship
. ‘But it’s a cumbersome method.
Pathfinder
’s divided into reinforced, airtight modules and the space in between is depressurized. On a ship this size it’s more efficient and faster.’
‘Look!’ One of the observers was pointing at the wall display. Previously it had just shown black space; now a step-through point appeared, expanding to fill their vision. And then it was gone and the SkySpy asteroid loomed large ahead. ‘We’re going in!’
‘
Able and Charlie Platoons, go go go!
’
Donna had just one last moment to swallow her nerves, and then her suit’s thrusters fired and she was out into space and dropping down to SkySpy.
‘
Able Platoon, make for primary entry point
,’ said Bill Perry’s voice in her ears.
‘Charlie Platoon, make for secondary entry point,’ Donna said.
On her right, the thirty armoured forms of Able Platoon suddenly blazed away in a haze of thruster gas. They were going in through what had been the bay for Lifeboat A.
Now Charlie Platoon was halfway between Pathfinder and SkySpy, falling towards a massive rocky mountain or flying straight at a huge rocky cliff, depending which way you looked at it. She felt her own armour’s thrusters come on again, nudging her and her twenty-nine subordinates to their own designated entry point into SkySpy, a maintenance lock just beyond the rock’s lower horizon. Thirty seconds to touchdown.
In the Malayan jungles, Donna had developed an instinct for possible ambushes, likely dangers. It might be a Pacifican insurgent, it might just be a snake that had chosen this piece of ground first. This wasn’t anything like a jungle but the old instincts could adapt.
‘Engineers to the front,’ she said. ‘Check for booby traps—’
Something blasted into her earphones; a cacophonous crackle of static that made her wince. Shouts told her that the others were getting it too.
‘
Able and Charlie Platoons, tell your suits to filter it
out
,’ Perry ordered. ‘
Don’t take anything that doesn’t
come from one of us
.’
And there was the airlock. Charlie Platoon’s suits retroed, they changed orientation to feet-first and touched down on the rock.
Pathfinder
’s computers were set to expect incoming radio traffic. They deduced the blast of static was a signal and analysed it. They ran it through the translator programs and, as a courtesy, they piped the result down to the observers.
I am (97%) / This is (88%) / Here is (62%) / Let’s hear
it for (43%) Marshal of Space/Space Marshal <
redeem (79%) / extract (42%) / counsel (29%) your
<
(64%) / forgotten (51%)
.
Gilmore frowned at the uncertain mass of probabilities and wondered what McLaughlin was making of it. The Rusties had observed Earth for years before making contact, and even then they had had to move among the population to get their translators working properly. The ambiguity in the XC translation was unavoidable but annoying.
He ran his eyes over and over that last line as if repeated effort would extract some last bit of information from the bald facts presented.
‘
Respond on their main ship frequency
,’ said McLaughlin’s voice. ‘
First, this asteroid belongs to us;
they are not to interfere with our operation. And second,
where are our two missing worthy sons?
’
McLaughlin had thought long and hard how best to speak to the XCs. The general opinion had been that, like an aggressive human, you didn’t respond with platitudes and weakness. To get respect, you just got aggressive back at them. Gilmore shut his eyes and hoped it had been the right choice.
There was a long pause, then a response. McLaughlin must have told the translator to go with the most likely translation and cut out the probabilities.
This is Marshal of Space <
‘
My what?
’ said McLaughlin.
‘His what?’ said an observer.
‘His mother,’ Gilmore said through his teeth. Naturally, the XCs would assume a mother was in charge of the mission. Even he knew that much about them.
Tell us about Joel, tell us where my boy
is . . .
The message went on.
Why do you dispute our capture of this hunting ground?
It is clearly ours. Your missing worthy sons crashed on
the third planet orbiting our sun. Let us return your
other worthy fallen sons to you
.
‘
Sir!
’ The new voice was one of the comms technicians on the flight deck. ‘
Images coming in from
Captain Perry . . . they’re bad, sir
.’
Able Platoon had entered SkySpy through the deserted lifeboat bay, and in a cavern beyond it they found the dead of SkySpy.
The bodies had been laid out neatly, hanging in microgravity just above the floor of the small cavern. Able Platoon moved silently among them, the more careless ones bumping into a suspended corpse that would slowly begin to move and jostle another, which would jostle yet another and so on until enough marines had reached out to steady the bodies and stop the movement.