Armor World Page 27

  “Centurion, Specialist,” Graves said. “Now is not the time. Arrange to meet each other on Green Deck the next time you’re both off-duty.”

  “We aren’t having a date, sir,” I said.

  “Nor are you two going to fight a duel right now on Blue Deck. Get over it.”

  Grumbling, we separated. Raash went to the big machine and dumped out a slimy lump of meat. It was disgusting in appearance, smell and texture.

  “Damn, Mogwa corpses smell bad,” I commented while watching.

  They stuffed the half-grown body into the recyclers, which hummed and buzzed in protest. I saluted it as it went down the chute.

  Graves noticed this and shook his head at me.

  “That alien has threatened to kill Earth on many occasions, McGill.”

  “Yeah… but he died a hero’s death this time around. I won’t forget him, even if we just permed another Mogwa.”

  Graves narrowed his eyes at me. “Another Mogwa? What are you talking about?”

  I realized I’d just let the cat out of the bag. Graves had known about my trip to Mogwa Prime during the Storm World campaign—but he hadn’t been privy to all the sordid details.

  On that trip, our last governor Xlur had ended up permed.

  “Well sir… it’s kind of hard to explain…” I said.

  Graves thought that over for a few seconds.

  “Never mind,” he said at last. “Just… don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know.”

  “You got it, Primus.”

  Graves kept casting me glances after that as the recyclers buzzed, but I said nothing.

  That was for the best, really.

  -47-

  After mulching the half-grown version of Sateekas, I wanted out. Graves was now carrying a tank with yellow and black warning signs all over it, but I never saw the actual application of the poison.

  I refused to watch the Mogwa die. Sure, that Captain Akuma fellow was a first-class asshole, but he’d fought well, and he was our guest.

  When it was all over, the ship shuddered a little. I knew Graves must have jettisoned the module, causing it to fall out of the warp-bubble and disintegrate.

  “What was that?” Harris asked, peering around at the walls suspiciously. After having endured several battles with overpowered opponents, he seemed to be more paranoid than usual.

  “It’s a ghost, Adjunct,” I told him with a smile.

  He peered at me next. “I know that smile. You’re holding something back. Thirty years of service with you… I know you, McGill.”

  That troubled me almost as much as killing the Mogwa had. If Harris had learned to penetrate my lies due to over-exposure, well, he’d be a lot harder to deal with on a daily basis.

  “Now, that’s just crazy-talk, Harris,” I said. “You know I’m a straight-shooter.”

  He snorted. “I know no such thing… sir.”

  “Excellent!” I said, clapping my hands together. I made a loud popping sound by cupping my hands a bit, and slamming them hard.

  He jumped, just a little.

  “What’s excellent?”

  “I accept your generous offer, Harris. And I appreciate it. As you’ve probably figured out by now, there have been some investigations and… uh… trials aboard ship lately.”

  “What?” he said in alarm.

  “You know I’ve been lurking on Gold Deck, right? You also know that some of our Mogwa guests met with untimely ends. What I need today is a character-witness. A man who’s known me for over thirty years should do the trick nicely.”

  I reached out to put my arm around his shoulders, but you would have thought I was trying to slip a rope around his neck.

  “Whoa! Hold on right there, McGill! I want nothing to do with your alibis or distracting side-stories.”

  “But… you just said…”

  His big flat hand came up between us. “Forget what I said. Erase it from your mind. You’re on your own.”

  He stalked off then, and I smiled. I could still pull a move or two on him. Harris hated commitment to a cause—especially if it met sticking his neck out for someone else.

  Whistling a tune, I headed down to see if I could get the attention of a lady-friend. I had several aboard ship at this moment, as it so happened. Since events were finally in a state of relative stability, I thought I might look one of them up.

  Deciding to go to Green Deck, where people on break were congregating this time of the evening, I headed for the elevators.

  Alas, romance wasn’t in the cards for old James McGill tonight. I didn’t make it twenty steps toward Green Deck before the entire ship rocked under my feet.

  Now, I’m no expert at flying starships, but I’d only felt something like the sensation I’d just experienced once before.

  “What the hell—?” I asked no one, reaching out and clutching at a bulkhead. It was as if I’d been struck by vertigo.

  Then it happened again. The ship rocked, and the lights flickered.

  Power loss?

  When it passed, I did a U-turn and ran for engineering. Could something be extremely wrong down there with the Alcubierre drive? That’s what if felt like to me.

  Long ago, when we’d been traveling about three hundred lightyears out to Blood World, our journey had been interrupted. On that occasion, a ship full of Gremlins had disrupted our warp bubble, causing us to fall out of warp and into normal space.

  This felt like that time.

  “McGill to Graves,” I called into my tapper. “McGill to Graves, I think there’s something wrong with the drive, sir.”

  A moment later Graves spoke from my tapper. “You’re right—but it isn’t what you think. We didn’t run into anything, instead, we’ve been hit by force-beams.”

  “Huh?”

  “Force-beams. Gravitational influencers that cause an object—even one in warp—to be tugged at and slowed down. The nerds down on the Lab decks explained it to us.”

  “We gotta run then, sir!” I shouted, stopping and breathing hard. “If they force us out of warp, we’ll be destroyed.”

  “The odds are high,” he admitted. “But that decision isn’t my call.”

  Drusus, I thought to myself.

  I cut the call with Graves, and I tried to get through to Drusus next—but it was already too late.

  All around me, I heard the moaning wind-down sound of the warp drive dying. They were dropping the warp-bubble, and I had no idea where we were. I doubted Drusus knew, either.

  A few minutes later, the walls began displaying an external view. I’m not sure what I expected to see—maybe that some Mogwa vessel had found the module full of their dead officers and run us down—but no… It wasn’t a Mogwa ship. I was quite surprised when the truth was revealed.

  “The Skay…” I said, looking at the walls in disbelief. I glanced at my tapper, but the same vid was playing everywhere.

  Behind our admittedly large ship was a huge one. The giant scarred-up sphere lurked close, right off our stern.

  In comparison to Legate, the Skay Invader was massive. You could only realize its true scale when it moved up-close and personal like this. A thousand of our vessels would have fit inside it.

  I began trotting, then running, for Gold Deck. A few minutes later I reached Legate’s circle of commanders and barged right in.

  No one ordered me out, or even challenged me. They seemed mesmerized.

  “We’ve been caught,” Winslade complained. “Like fleeing rats. I can’t believe their tech is so advanced. They ran us down while we were inside a warp bubble—how do you go about explaining the physics of that?”

  “Shut up, Primus,” Drusus said in a hushed, defeated tone. “We’ve been captured. We can’t resist such a ship. Contact the Skay—tell them we surrender.”

  “No!” I shouted, and everyone in the place swiveled their heads to look at me in shock.

  “McGill!” Graves boomed. “Get off this deck!”

  “I’m sorry sir, but—”
>
  “Let him speak,” Drusus said in a tired voice. “Are you about to scold us for having killed the Mogwa, McGill? Is this our comeuppance?”

  “No sir, not exactly. But I do think jettisoning the Mogwa pod was a mistake. Think about the trail it must have left as it disintegrated into particles—like a flare in space.”

  They stared at me for a moment. One of the techs on the crew cleared her throat. “Ah… he could be right, sir. Dropping a large object out of warp causes a comet the speed of light to appear. Of course, we had no idea we were being pursued…”

  “Of course we didn’t,” Drusus said. “Their tech is so superior to ours, it’s like witchcraft.”

  “But don’t surrender, sir,” I advised. “That’s the wrong move.”

  “Why not? These are Galactics, McGill. They’ve caught up to us fair-and-square. There’s no breaking away from their force-beams. Firing at them now is pointless.”

  “Firing at them?” I laughed. “No sir, that wouldn’t be a good idea either. These creatures are like the Mogwa, but worse. They are a species based on machine intelligence. If you don’t give them a good reason to let you live… well sir, there’s not much hope.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’ve been to the Core Worlds, sir. I’ve walked the slideways of Mogwa Prime. I saw other Galactic species come and go back then. To them, rebels are useless—but slaves can be valuable. We have to convince them we’re valuable.”

  Drusus blinked at me, and Graves took an angry step in my direction. “Are you suggesting we should offer ourselves up as servants to this new master? That’s the same kind of crap that Armel was peddling.”

  “Noooo, Primus,” I said. “Not that. Not exactly. We have to make them curious. We have to make them uncertain.”

  “And how, exactly, do you suggest we do that?” Drusus asked.

  “Well sir, it’s kind of hard to describe. If you could see fit to putting me into contact with them, however…”

  “That’s out of the question, McGill,” Graves snorted.

  Drusus was quiet. Graves looked at him with a deep frown. “Don’t tell me, sir…”

  “We’ll intrigue them,” Drusus said at last. “Send no messages. Fire no weapons. Allow ourselves to be drawn toward their ship.”

  “That’s good,” I said, smiling.

  “Sir, we have to fight or flee,” Graves said.

  Drusus looked at him. “McGill is right. We can’t do either.”

  After that, the force-beams got a really good grip on us. Slowly, we were drawn closer and closer to the giant ship.

  “We’re going to crash into that thing,” Winslade complained.

  “Steady as she goes…” Drusus said.

  Right before the gravitational tug of the bigger ship should have taken over and crashed us into the planet-sized mass, a massive dark line appeared on the face of the vessel.

  This black line quickly widened into a slit, then a mouth—and finally, a yawning doorway.

  We were being dragged inside the heavily fortified planetoid. Techs read off distances and velocities, but no one spoke among the top commanders.

  I got the feeling they didn’t know what the hell they should do.

  -48-

  Of everyone on that bridge, only I had been inside the monster before. I felt like an unlucky Jonah, once again being swallowed by the same damned whale.

  “They must have been following us all the way out from 51 Pegasi,” Drusus said. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Winslade tapped at a screen and shook his head, sighing deeply. “Although it pains me to say it: McGill was right. The techs have confirmed it. We left a trail in space by jettisoning that module full of dead Mogwa. Instead of covering for our crimes, it lit us up like a spotlight.”

  “Told you,” I said.

  Graves hung his head. I could have told him it wasn’t his fault, not really—but I didn’t have time for babysitting. Besides, he wouldn’t have listened to me anyway.

  “McGill,” Drusus said, “you’ve been in the belly of this beast before. What’s our best course of action?”

  “Uh… probably to warp out again.”

  “Don’t you think we might have already tried that, hmm?” Winslade asked. “They’ve got some kind of warp-dampening field. We can’t generate the bubble. We’re being dragged inside their ship, probably to be dismantled and probed.”

  “Or turned into some of those armored monsters,” I suggested.

  They all looked alarmed at that, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to them before. That seemed odd to me, but then I hadn’t been floating around on Legate in relative luxury during these engagements like they had. To me, the conversion process these hybrid aliens could put a man through was very real.

  “What’s our second best option?” Drusus asked, looking around at his team.

  Graves spoke up after a pregnant silence. “I think we’ve all come to the same conclusion: there’s only one option.”

  “And that is?” Drusus asked.

  “We self-destruct Legate once we’re inside, naturally.” Graves looked honestly surprised at the rest of us, as if this drastic move was glaringly clear to him.

  “That sounds… extreme,” Winslade said. “How will we escape?”

  Graves snorted. “We don’t. Come on, Primus. Sew your balls on. It’s better than being ground into hamburger and stuffed into one of their machines.”

  “There’s no way we can get a signal out to Earth from here,” Drusus said, tapping at the controls. “That machine is casting too much interference to use any normal transmitter, and Legate doesn’t have an onboard deep-link.”

  “We’ve got gateway posts,” Winslade said. “We could set them up and send a messenger… I would even be willing to volunteer for the duty.”

  Drusus and Graves looked at him sourly, but Drusus nodded. “All right, run down to Gray Deck and try to port home. Carry our roster of dead and living with you. They can assume we all need a revival if they don’t hear from us in a year or so. Hurry though, once we get into that ship the posts may not work.”

  He was already talking to Winslade’s back. Damn, that boy could scoot when a nasty death was right on his tail.

  “So,” I said conversationally, “are we going to blow ourselves up?”

  “We don’t have any A-bombs left,” Graves said thoughtfully. “We’ve got a few low-yield fusion warheads on our missiles—it will have to do.”

  “See to it,” Drusus ordered, “but don’t blow us up just for the hell of it. Wait until I give the order.”

  Graves looked like he disapproved, but he was too good of a soldier to argue with a superior officer. He marched off the deck with sharp, steady steps.

  Drusus turned to me next. I could tell by the look in his eyes he had something unpleasant in mind.

  “I’ll do it, sir!” I said loudly.

  “I haven’t described your mission yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m your man. It’s time to push all the chips in the middle right now.”

  “True…” he said, thinking hard. “I’m going to organize an attack on their bridge.”

  “Uh… does anyone have the slightest idea where that might be located?”

  “No,” Drusus admitted. “This vessel dwarfs anything we’ve ever seen. All of Battle Fleet 921—the original fleet—would have been outclassed by this monster.”

  I’d actually laid eyes on old Battle Fleet 921 on a few occasions, prior to its destruction in the Core Systems. That fleet had been powerful—but I had to agree with Drusus. This monstrosity would have taken down all twelve hundred of those ships.

  “Maybe, sir,” I said, “we could concentrate all our guns on the hinges again. We could leave the Skay ship’s mouth hanging open, just like I did last time.”

  “That’s a reasonable suggestion, McGill,” Drusus said. “But I don’t think that trick will work twice. The enemy has force beams locked on our ship. Even if the door is left hanging ope
n, we can’t escape. Worse, what do you think the enemy response would be to such an action?”

  “Hmm… They’d probably blow us away.”

  “Exactly. And we know they can repair the door. All we would do in that scenario is inconvenience the enemy and get ourselves killed. I want more than that, if I can get it.”

  This concerned me, as I was of the mind that just hurting this monster would be pretty impressive at this point.

  “Here’s how I want to play this,” Drusus told the staff. “Assuming they don’t just blow our ship apart, I’m going to deploy our ground forces on their inside hull, prepped for battle.”

  “Really?” I asked. “You think that’s going to work out?”

  “Maybe not… but we’ll do it anyway. From everything we’ve learned, these Skay like to capture people and convert them into their servants. I think that’s why they’re dragging us into their ship right now. Capturing is always harder than killing. It gives us a chance to strike back.”

  “Speaking of capturing…” I said, pointing at the displays.

  The universe outside went dark. All the stars vanished as we were swallowed by the bigger ship. The massive door began to roll downward ominously the moment we were inside.

  “We’ve got some weapons, don’t we?” I asked.

  “We do—but we don’t know where to aim them. That’s where you come in—not just you, I’m sending out dozens of deep scouting patrols.”

  “Uh…”

  “I know it doesn’t sound promising, but we’ve got no other plays. Get out there with a hand-picked squad. Scout for me, locate a vital target. We’ll fire on it when you do.”

  “What will you guys be doing back here in the meantime?”

  “We’ll take improvisational action. We’ll distract the enemy. We’ll put up a lively fight and let them capture some of us. That way, you’ll get time to locate targets.”

  This was sounding worse by the minute to me. I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground when it came to taking down a vessel this big—but I knew for sure there was no way these aliens were going to let me run wild inside their ship for long.

  “Hmm…” I said doubtfully. “How do we get past their initial troop formations? They’ll probably send those flying robot-things and lots of runners out to surround us...”