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TYCE BUCKLED HIMSELF into the pilot seat of the Classe shuttle. He hated the narrow nose and cramped quarters. It felt as if he was flying an antique jet plane for all the elbow room he had, but the stripped-down shuttle had more capacity for weapons and cargo than any of their pods. Those heavy beasts were relics from the Terraforming days. They’d been used to drop microbes and insect life required for larger Earth mammals to survive.
People shuffled in the back. Weapons clicked and bags slid across the floor as the assault team prepared. Yoss slid into the gunner position. Tyce raised an eyebrow. Yoss ignored him. The man took taciturn to a new level, but he was good on weapons, so Tyce dropped it. He would rather have Ama on second station, but she was probably planning on going out with the assault team.
He continued his pre-launch checklist. After a time, Ama slipped into the seat behind him. “Our people are set and Phemos is staying behind to punch the engines before using the last life-pod. He’s waiting for us to launch.”
“Phemos? Why not Bunyi?”
Phemos had unmatched computer skills, but his piloting left something to be desired. He focused too much on getting Jela into his bed. Some days Tyce missed the military rules that made people hide their assignations if they were stationed together. Soldiers who didn’t, got passed over for dangerous assignments that led to fast-track promotions. Command said they wanted to avoid breaking up a pairing by sending one into danger. Tyce suspected they really wanted to keep married couples away from front line areas where they might see atrocities. No one confided in their parents after they’d seen a child’s head blown off, but people confided in their partners about everything, and Command liked to hide their dirty laundry.
“Bunyi doesn’t run as fast. He’s getting older. Phemos just needs to turn the engines to full. He’ll be fine.”
“He’s no more likely to die than any of us,” Yoss pointed out.
“You are too young to be so pessimistic,” Ama chided him. “Do you want me to change the orders for the pilot?”
Tyce shook his head. “It’s fine.” Ama had known most of these people from birth. Sure, some people like him and Yoss and Jerry had joined during the war, but the Dragon was largely a family. He trusted her judgment. He flipped the various switches to manually activate the systems. “Is everyone on a ship?”
“Everyone except Phemos. When you launch, that starts our ten minute timer. Would you reconsider my request that you move to one of the pods? If the assault succeeds, we’ll need your tactical insight on how to hold the ship.”
Joahan spoke up from the back. “And I would like both of you to join a pod because both of you are too important to lose, but I live to be disappointed. Now can we get on with this?” Ama rolled her eyes. She was endlessly amused by Joahan’s attempts to protect her.
Joahan was right. The longer they delayed, the greater the chance the enemy would punch through the Dragon’s shields, and she’d be too damaged to play decoy. “Button up,” he called to the back, and he hit the release switch. The shuttle broke away from the Dragon’s gravity, and Tyce’s stomach tried to float away from his intestines. He remembered this, the drop away from the ship. Back then, it would have been followed by the hard pull of gravity as the shuttle fell into the gravity well of a planet. The pounding of weapons fire and countermeasures would have made the ship shiver as the rebels tried to destroy their ship before it landed.
Back then , Tyce had been in the rear with a Command crew, monitoring the soldiers for any signs of panic, and tugging on all the assault harnesses to make sure the novices had geared out properly. Sometimes they loosened the buckles so they wouldn’t get heat and pressure sores, but a loose harness rubbed and shifted so your weapon wouldn’t be where you needed it.
Tyce accelerated slowly, allowing the distance between the shuttle and the Dragon to increase. Pods dropped off the ship’s backside like rain. She’d been a good home, the first place Tyce had relaxed since leaving Earth. And now she was sacrificing herself to block their assault.
Tyce kept his attention on the meteor trail of pods and shuttles trailing in the wake of the Dragon. The assault shuttles needed to outpace them. Tyce navigated around the others as they employed braking jets. They would wait here in the black for a signal that the boarding crews had succeeded. They were all good people, and if Tyce’s plan failed, they would all continue to wait and hope until the air failed the ships one by one.
“The Command ship is moving,” Ama reported.
“Moving how?” Tyce switched on starboard sensors.
“It's matching the Dragon’s speed, approaching the alien ship.”
“What the hell are they doing?”
“I think they're following your lead. Look, life pods.” Ama sent her data stream to his secondary display. Sure enough, the crippled Command ship was hobbling its way toward the alien ship and a stream of escape pods and assault shuttles flowed out of the back bays.
“Well, shit.” That complicated issues. If the aliens put up a fight, the Command soldiers would have the heavy ordnance they’d need to punch through. However, if those same soldiers got a foothold, the Dragon crew would end up in an alien version of a holding cell until Command could drag them back to Earth space. The others would get convicted for smuggling. That was common enough that Earth didn’t have enough prison cells to lock everyone up. However, Tyce had no illusions about what Command would do to him.
He was an officer who had chosen to turn against his men. They would never forgive him.
Ama spoke. “What did you think they were going to do?”
“I was hoping they would die quietly and leave us alone. However, say what you want about Command, and I say horrible things about them all the time, their people know how to fight. If those are Rownt in there, we’ll need the help.”
“I don't know, I'm pretty sure Command would team up with the Rownt against us.” She sounded disgusted. Yoss snorted.
“Don't bet on it. That ship opened fire without provocation, and Command does not handle being disrespected. Not even a little.” Tyce knew that firsthand. One hint of an officer disagreeing with official policy and they pretty well broke their own backs to make a point. If they had a choice between forgiving or war, they’d choose war. That was especially true now that the colonies had fallen. “Fuck. I don’t need this shit. Not now.”
Ama rested her hand on his shoulder, which meant she had unfastened her harness. “Focus on the here and now.”
“I am perfectly capable of focusing on the now and still being aggravated about the possible ways Command could fuck up my plan.”
She sighed in disappointment. “No one can focus on the here and now and the future at the same time.”
“Maybe I'm a wonder of the metaphysical world?”
She patted him before withdrawing. “You're a wonder of something, but it isn't the metaphysical world.”
Tyce clasped his hands over his heart in mock indignation. “You wound me. I'm wounded. Don't I look wounded?” Tyce turned to Yoss for support.
He raised one eyebrow and gave a gruff, “Nope.” Ama was right. He was too damn pessimistic for a young man, but then he’d lost his pregnant wife to this cursed war. “Do I target Command?” Yoss’s hand hovered near the weapons console. Ama was uncharacteristically silent.
They would never win a three-way fight. If Command was following the Dragon’s lead, it was best to take advantage of that truce, no matter how temporary. “No. As soon as the Dragon breaks up, target the weakest spot in the enemy hull. Ama, track our Command buddies and light up their entry point. If we get resistance, we’ll want to fight our way toward the Command boarding party.” And when their units met, Tyce would make sure he was far, far, far to the rear. Command was more likely to deal fairly with the others.
Tyce touched his radio. “Joahan, are you following the conversation?”
“No, I thought I’d catch up on the latest episodes on vid,” he said. Tyce suspected that the Dragon had suffered one too many close calls because most of the crew were sarcastic as hell.
“Well, when you’re done with the vids, decide how you want to handle Command.” Tyce would not make those sorts of decisions. Emotionally, he couldn’t.
Tyce focused on the Dragon. He could see her form shudder as weapon fire hit it. However, the engines continued to burn hard. She shuddered again, and huge cracks appeared in the starboard shielding. “Phemos is away,” Ama said as the last pod fell off the back of the Dragon.
The grand old ship had once carried settlers to Ribelo. She had ferried terraforming equipment and served as a platform for asteroid mining. She had been decommissioned and left to float in the black, waiting until someone needed to steal a spare part from here or there—a slow death by electronic dismemberment. Then the war came. The families who called her home had, for the most part, fled to avoid the fighting. The Dragon had become a haven, a flying refugee camp then, as supplies in the colonies dwindled, a pirate ship, stealing from Command supply drops.
She’d had a long and storied life, and now long fissures opened in her hull. Flames burst toward space as oxygenated areas ruptured and the gas burned off in the cold. A hard blast hit her, something far more destructive than any weapon the aliens had used before, and her hull shattered into thousands of shrapnel-sharp projectiles.
“Shields up, lock formation. Protect the pods,” Tyce ordered.
The other assault shuttles accelerated into a diamond formation, flying close enough that they protected the more vulnerable pods behind them.
“Moving the Turtle up,” Rhea said on coms.
“Negative. Maintain rear.”
“We have the best shielding. I’m moving up.” The Turtle’s engines fired and Rhea moved the one ship with all the children into secondary position.
“Rhea’s right,” Ama said, vetoing Tyce’s order.
“If their shields fail...”
“We’re taking most of the damage. Rhea can catch anything that slips between our shuttles,” Ama said. “The same debris would tear through a pod.”
Tyce gritted his teeth and focused on secondary weapons. Yoss blasted anything large enough to pose a real threat, and Tyce caught the few pieces he missed. Hopefully the aliens would dismiss the energy bursts as the death throes of the Dragon. As they cleared the debris field, Tyce flipped the ship so hard he instantly got a headache. That worried him less than the risk of getting blown to pieces. Even if the aliens dismissed them as debris, they might decide to blast it rather than letting a large chunk hit them. It depended on the technical specs for their hull, which Tyce didn’t know, and the way the aliens calculated risk, which he also didn’t know.
In the academy he had been known for crazy plans, but this exceeded any insanity he had ever tried to get past his tactics instructors. Holding his breath made his headache worse, so he forced himself to breathe through each passing second. The entire shuttle was eerily silent as they fell toward the alien ship.
“Weakness identified,” Yoss whispered as they drifted toward the wider end. The whole shuttle had taken on a funereal tone.
“Moving into position on my mark.” The hull grew closer. “Contamination equipment on.” Tyce pulled the clunky helmet into place and locked it to his collar before he pulled on the gloves.
Finally the shuttle thumped against the alien ship, and for the first time, Tyce got a perspective on the size of the monster. It was so large that a dozen Dragons would have fit in the hold, with room to spare. That matched the reports he’d heard on the Rownt, but they used processed metals, same as humans. This ship had a dark skin of some sort, and colors played across the surface like an opal when the light hit it. Definitely alien.
“Locking!” Joahan shouted and then a concussive pop filled the cabin. “Go, go, go!”
Tyce unbuckled his harness as fast as he could, but Yoss and Ama still made it out of the shuttle before he reached the breach. The shuttle had a solid lock on the hull, and the material they’d punched through was much thinner than Tyce had expected.
The ship was dimly lit and vaguely organic. A few pipes overhead pulsed with fluids that looked far more like the vomit of some recruit after that first big drinking binge than the purified liquids and fuels in an Earth-made ship’s system. The corridor curved at either end, severely limiting their field of view.
A second shuttle thunked against the hull, and a dull blast filled the corridor, but any residual flame died immediately, as if there were fire retardant in the air. Foxtrot team spilled into the passage and immediately moved into defensive positions. “Signals?” Foxtrot’s leader asked. It was either Wirki or Kiwir—Tyce couldn’t tell the brothers apart when they had on contamination suits.
“Clear,” Joahan said.
“Maybe the aliens are invisible,” Yoss said with his usual optimism.
The corridor was so narrow that they were all pressed together like those little yellow floating toys in a children’s shooting gallery. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. “Move out thirty yards,” Tyce ordered, even though it would require both to go around curving corners. The risk of getting caught in a bottleneck was greater than any exposure while moving.
Tyce signaled to Yoss and Ama, and all three of them followed Alpha. The corridor turned and turned again. The labyrinthine and tight passage was giving Tyce claustrophobia. They turned another corner, and Alpha team held position at thirty yards.
“Report!”
Tyce got back an orderly set of clicks that meant all was well in both units, no aliens. In other circumstances, he would have moved more slowly, but he sent the signal for them to advance again. A member of Alpha pointed toward the wall, and Tyce brought his weapon up, expecting a doorway. Instead a floor-to-ceiling panel with a raised texture lined one wall. Small tubes carried fluids of various colors and a display weakly flashed yellow-green-yellow-blue-red-pink-yellow-yellow.
Ama came closer. “Control unit?” She guessed.
Tyce could only shrug. He took out a breach bar and placed it against the outside hull before activating the explosive charge. The base opened into a metallic bowl that sealed the hole and the beacon extended past the hull, giving the next shuttle a target. That one would carry the logistics team, so if anyone could figure it out, they could. “Foxtrot, hold. Alpha, repeat.” The assault team moved again, and Tyce followed.
He felt a pop as their shuttle breached, and techs came out, their instruments already running. Wyt stopped, his computer interface held up as he stared at the walls, probably wondering what the hell he was supposed to plug into. Most of the walls were smooth, warm and featureless. And the textured wall had nothing that resembled an interface.
Mond knelt next to his sensor and read off numbers. “Sixty-three percent nitrogen; seven, oxygen; twenty-two, carbon dioxide; two, argon. Water vapor at two point three and acidic.” He looked up. “It won’t support human life now, but we have the basic building blocks for air. We can scrub this and make it work.”
The fear crushing Tyce’s heart eased some. If they lacked certain chemical building blocks, the ship would have poisoned them no matter what the atmospheric techs did. But this idiotic plan might work.
“Ease off your thrusters,” Tuch said loudly. “I need several hours to check for poisons, spores, bacteria, and viruses. In case you haven’t noticed, this thing looks alive, and life means microorganisms.” She ran her sample wand over the wall. She was head of engineering, and Tyce trusted her to find every danger and then imagine a few that didn’t exist.
Ama rested a hand on Tuch’s back. “I know you will be thorough, but do remember that we stand on this ground or we fall.”
“I’d rather have my son die of asphyxiation than develop some hemorrhagic fever or form an allergy to his own skin.” Tuch’s voice had no room for compromise.
Tyce respected her concern, but he also knew that organisms developed in one biome rarely survived in another. The contact with Anla had proven that. Scientists had tested every biological material the aliens would give them. Nothing under half a centimeter survived without larger life forms from the Anla home world to support them.
“It isn’t all good,” Mond said. “Six parts per million sulfur dioxide, so we can safely say this place smells like a giant fart.”
“It looks like it should.” Ama said. “What do we know about organic tech?”
“Nothing,” Tyce answered.
Ribelo had quite the spy network, so they had copies of most military reports out of the Greater States or Coptic Union, and no one had intel on biological tech.
“That’s not helpful,” Ama said as she watched Wyt run his gloved hands over the walls.
Tyce scoffed. “I didn’t think it would be, but I’m telling you, Command has nothing on organic tech. After the artificial intelligence program used organic thought patterning for the Guardian class ships, no one wanted to touch organic again. It’s unstable and unpredictable.”
Tyce grimaced as a series of small holes in the wall opened like a row of tiny gaping mouths. And gross. Organic tech was gross.
“And stinky,” Mond added. “These sulfur levels are disgusting.”
“If the ship is alive, it has to ingest fuel and off-gas waste product. We might be standing in the middle of a fart,” Ama said.
Tyce forced down a gag. “Oh, that is so much more pleasant. Thank you.”
Ama put her hand on his communication patch to create a private connection. “At this level, the sulfur is unhealthy for us long term and it’s dangerous for children and the elderly or sick. They’ll die.”
“Then we find a section with cleaner air or we set up a clean room and start our own atmospheric scrubbers. Right now, focus on clearing the ship and identifying critical systems.”
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded—all business. “Volie, Wyt, track power conduits. Mond, give Tuch a hand on biologicals.”
Tyce refocused on logistics. They needed to find the water supply for the vapor in the air, the command deck or any sort of interface, crew quarters or defensive systems, and the location of the Command boarding party. “Alpha, Foxtrot, move out. Secure any locals, but do not engage unless targeted. Bravo, Echo, board and follow.”
No doubt a few soldiers were having private conversations about how Tyce was insane for that order, but he wouldn’t start a fight unless the other side wanted one. They’d learned from the Anla that aliens rarely had the same instincts as humans, so maybe these people had some alien reason for opening fire on them. They’d targeted the Dragon’s engines and weapons while avoiding life support systems. That was enough for Tyce to give them the benefit of one doubt. Just once. Any additional aggressive acts would be met with extreme prejudice.
They reached the first set of doors, but they were secured. “Are the aliens hiding?” Ama asked softly. “Maybe they rely on their technology and are too fragile or frightened to fight in person.”
“Then they shouldn’t open fire on other ships,” Tyce said.
His radio clicked. The familiar pattern meant they had Command in the area. Fuck. He clicked back for radio silence. No one won a war on two fronts. No one. At least not without being so weakened that another force immediately took advantage of the chaos. That was one of the primary lessons of war college. That was why Earth had immediately brokered a truce with the Anla the moment the colony planets had used that distraction to declare independence. Tyce didn’t know if this would turn into a human versus alien battle or if the Dragon crew would have to fight off both alien and Command personnel too stupid to realize that their changed circumstances required them to shift tactics. They may have been sent out to hunt down fleeing rebel ships, but no one back home had briefed them for this possibility.
Ama said in their private line. “It changes nothing.”
“If they get control of critical systems, they’ll arrest us.” The second the other crew felt in control, they would go back to primary orders, assuming they didn’t carry out arrests in the middle of an alien battle. They might do that.
“They’ll have as much trouble finding the systems as we are,” she pointed out.
“I know. But we need to move faster. We have to claim territory or risk getting isolated if their soldiers move too fast. We need everyone in here.” Tyce knew he was right. They had made him captain not to run the day-to-day operations. The Dragon had successfully run blockades and salvaged ships long before he’d joined their crew. No, they made him captain because they lacked the understanding of the military mindset. Tyce could counter Command’s moves... even the illogical ones. He turned his radio to all-broadcast. If Command officers heard him, all the better. It would make them cautious and slow. “Full deploy. Full deploy. All Dragon crew with self-contained air units to docking beacons.”
Three members of Alpha team came running back toward him, breaching rods already out. One punched a hole through the hull near them while the other two ran farther back to leave room for the shuttles to maneuver and lock on.
With her radio set to general broadcast, Ama said softly, “The die is cast.”