Dust World Read online

  Maybe that’s what the enemy had been waiting for. I’ll never know for sure. As our troops began surging up one at a time into the chamber, the squids made their move.

  In space, humans are rather clumsy. We’re used to gravity, and we don’t operate well without it. Worse, we need air to breathe and a lot of temperature controls in order to be comfortable. As bad as I’d thought fighting on Steel World had been, it was a picnic compared to fighting in space.

  Our opponents were not as disadvantaged as we were. They had many limbs, not just four. They could use any of them in any configuration to grip a wall or some other hold, anchor themselves and get leverage. In addition, they seemed to feel more at home in space. They swam in it as if it was water. I was immediately struck by this as they began appearing at the breach overhead and darting down through it like fish. I knew in that instant that they were at least a partially aquatic species. I’d thought they’d looked pretty agile loping on all those tentacles to overrun us the first time, but they looked even more graceful in null-G.

  -9-

  I didn’t fire right off. Instead, I waited about half a second. Sargon, to my surprise, did the same. Then we both let go at almost the same moment.

  Gouts of plasma leapt up in unison toward the dozen or so enemy. They withered instantly in response because both Sargon and I had dialed our weapons for broad cones of fire.

  Only two of the monsters made it to us, but that was enough to do a lot of damage. My tube was plucked from my grasping gauntlets by the tentacle of one of them. The creature methodically raised and lowered the tube. I barely had time to shy away as the weapon crashed down upon my shoulder plate. If I hadn’t been wearing heavy armor, I’d have suffered a broken collarbone at the least—perhaps I’d have been struck dead.

  Fortunately, my armor held, but the tube itself was damaged. Despite my peril, I was more worried about my weapon than I was my own life. My body could be repaired more easily than the alien weapon, and others could wield it if I fell. The cannons seemed to be our best defense against these creatures, and I had no idea how many more we might have to defeat.

  I reached for the tube and struggled to take it back before the thrashing alien clubbed more of us with it. I grabbed it and hung on.

  Back home, I’d ridden mechanical bulls upon occasion, usually while seriously intoxicated. I wished I’d had a few drinks in me now. The squid didn’t want to give back my tube, and that thing was strong. It lashed its limbs like whips, and I went flying with them. Only the power of my exoskeletal suit and the fact I’d managed to wrap my fist into the shoulder strap allowed me to hang on at all.

  To tell the truth, the next fifteen seconds were a blur. I was whipping around like a ragdoll, vaguely aware of the rest of my unit engaging this creature and the other one that had made it in close. They stabbed the squids and slashed away their tentacles. They had a plan now, and the process went more cleanly this time.

  By the time my squid stopped thrashing, my helmet was starred and my brains were a little rattled. Kivi made it to me first. She stared worriedly into my faceplate.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “You’re alive?”

  “I think so.”

  She slapped my helmet, which made me wince. My neck hurt, but I managed to force a smile.

  “Help me up,” I said.

  She did, and I managed to get my magnetic boots to clamp onto the deck. I stood unsteadily, glad my suit could almost balance itself. The world was spinning.

  “Did you puke in that suit?” Harris asked, coming close and glaring into the faceplate at me.

  “No sir,” I said. “But I think I have a leak. Something’s flashing on my oxygen supply meter.”

  “What’s the reading?”

  “Can’t tell, sir. That part of the glass is cracked too badly.”

  “Crazy mother,” he said, giving me a shake. He shouted over his shoulder: “Tech!”

  Natasha came over and began working on my suit. She clucked and cursed at me in even proportions. Soon she had a glaze of fresh plastic crawling across the inside of my visor. I assumed it was a nanite repair kit she was applying. They’d heat up then remelt the plastic, forming a fresh glaze. It would be a little blurry but much better than a network of cracks. Best of all, my suit would be airtight again.

  Graves came over to me next. He looked me over with a critical eye.

  “Are you functional, Specialist?”

  “Yes sir,” I said in the strongest voice I could muster. “I’m doing fine.”

  Weakness was a bad thing to let on about in Legion Varus. If I couldn’t keep up, it might be for the best for the unit to put me down. Normally, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing because you’d get a fresh body an hour or so later. But today I didn’t want to risk it. As far as I knew, we might never reestablish contact with the rest of the legion.

  “You went for a quite a ride,” Graves said. “Was that an accident? I noticed your gauntlet was caught in your straps.”

  “No sir,” I said. “I didn’t want the creature to have my weapon.”

  Graves chewed that over for a moment, then nodded. “Excellent,” he said, and left.

  I watched him through my visor, which was now slightly warped rather than nearly opaque. The nanites were dying off, having run out of power. Nanites didn’t live long; they usually didn’t have batteries that lasted more than a few minutes. A fine dust of metal tickled my nose and fell away like steel filings. They bugged my skin slightly, and the sensation was like the one I always had after a haircut. I knew I needed a shower to wash them away completely, but that wasn’t happening any time soon.

  Natasha watched me. “Use your tapper to evacuate the dust from your helmet,” she told me. “You don’t want that dust to get into your lungs. Dead nanites can be carcinogens.”

  I did as she suggested. The prickly sensation on my skin was still there but less intense. Within a few minutes, I no longer needed to sneeze.

  While I was recovering, the rest of the team searched the bridge. I joined them when I could. All around the walls there were control systems and odd-looking perches with straps too short to support anyone larger than a child. The screens were dead, however, and the safety straps were floating in the void.

  The scouts Graves had sent up through the rip in the ceiling came down as we looked around. They’d been crawling out there, checking on the external hull. They gave us the thumbs-up, having met with nothing but vacuum and debris.

  “I think we have a good idea of how the attack went down,” Graves said, addressing the survivors a few minutes later. There were only about half of us left alive, I noted with some alarm.

  “The aliens ripped open the hull and came onto the bridge directly into the control center. I would guess the Skrull were caught by surprise. They probably didn’t expect an assault the moment they came out of warp. The vacuum probably killed them as fast as anything else. Not many bodies in the seats—they were probably sucked out into space.”

  I thought about it. I could see the attack in my mind: A sudden explosion, a gush of hot air out into the absolute cold that was space. The Skrull must have died in horror and anguish wondering what was happening to them and their ship.

  “But sir,” I said, “what was the enemy’s ultimate goal? Did they hope to destroy the ship or capture it?”

  “Doesn’t matter much now,” Graves said. “I doubt they expected stiff resistance. We amounted to an effective security force.”

  I nodded but wasn’t satisfied with the answers he’d come up with so far. How had they pulled this off? I’d never heard of anyone attacking a starship before. I guessed that was because the Empire was too terrifying. No one dared.

  “Do you think we got them all, sir?” Carlos asked.

  Graves grunted noncommittally. “We’ll find out soon enough. I want everyone to help Natasha get the power back up. Harris, get a detail on that rip in the ceiling. Use some emergency decking and patch it up.”

&nb
sp; “Are we going to repressurize, sir?” Harris asked.

  “If we’re lucky.”

  We got to work then. The enemy didn’t attack right away, and for that I was very glad. I could still feel the bruises and scrapes my armor had created when that last squid had given me the ragdoll treatment.

  We pushed the alien bodies out of the rip, one by one, but saved the corpse that was the least damaged. Graves explained we had to keep one for the bio people to dissect later on.

  The whole process took several hours, but we managed to get the power up again. Very quickly, we had a com-link up to the rest of the legion in the main sector of the ship. I was happy to learn they hadn’t all been killed in the attack.

  Primus Turov spoke to us personally when we’d managed to get her on the line.

  “I want to congratulate you all on a job well done,” she began. “Graves, you’d just formed up that heavy unit, and I’m frankly shocked you pulled this off without help.”

  That statement could be taken as an insult or a compliment, and coming from Turov, I suspected it was intended to be a little of both.

  Graves took it all in stride, however. “Thank you, Primus. Legion Varus always gets the job done.”

  “Exactly. Now I want to discuss with your team what we’re going to do next. I’m going to report to the Tribune for the final decision, of course.”

  “Naturally,” Graves said.

  Inside my own quiet helmet, I translated the true meaning of her words. I was beginning to know my commanders and how the legion operated as a whole. What the primus meant was she would gather all the intel from us, then turn around and deliver it to the legion’s overall commander, Tribune Drusus. That way, she could hog all the glory for a mission in which she’d avoided all personal involvement.

  “Here’s how I see it,” Turov began. “There’s only one explanation for this situation: We’ve encountered a new, unknown, definitely feral species. It’s a worst case scenario, really. The Galactics probably knew they were here all along but hadn’t gotten around to dropping the hammer on them. Sometimes a race of beings is so vicious, they can’t be reasoned with. I’ve read about cases like this. Usually, a truly savage race would rather fight to the finish than give in to the Empire. That’s their choice, and they invariably suffer the consequences. Humanity was considered borderline in comparison. We were almost too savage to become a civilized world. Even after our application was accepted and our viability as a trader of mercenary troops was proven, some factions within the Empire wanted us excised, predicting we would be trouble down the road. We were closer to being snuffed out right from the start than most people realize.”

  Her little speech impressed me. She had a better grasp of the situation than I’d thought , and I’d learned a few things along the way. In Legion Varus, we generally operated on a need-to-know basis. Things were safer that way. But with internal legion politics involved, lower-level people rarely got the whole story about anything.

  “Does anyone have anything to add?” Turov asked.

  Her holographic image was in the center of the dark circular chamber. Most of us had gathered around listening to her, but Natasha and several others were working on the ship’s systems. The ship was designed to be operated by the Skrull, but most subsystems had been produced somewhere within the Empire and were built for default humanoid manipulation. Standard symbols and fittings were everywhere, and every member of the Empire learned how to handle Imperial computer interfaces almost before they learned to speak. The controls were very intuitive and largely based upon touch.

  When I saw no one was going to speak up, I stood and addressed her. She looked at me expectantly. As we were still in a hard vacuum, I couldn’t open my helmet. I realized she probably didn’t know who I was. That was just as well, but I knew I had to identify myself.

  “Specialist McGill speaking, sir,” I said. “I’m wondering about the human colonists that were supposed to be out here—what happened to them?”

  Primus Turov’s expression darkened the moment she heard my name. I could tell right away she hadn’t forgotten about me.

  “That’s a question, and it’s not going to help with my report,” she snapped. “But the truth is that the colonists are probably all dead. With a local nest of vicious aliens like these in the system, how could they have survived?”

  “Are you sure that the squid-aliens came from this system?”

  “It’s possible,” she said. “We really don’t know. What we do know is that our mission here is complete and successful. We were charged with eliminating a threat to Earth’s livelihood, and we’ve done just that. Well—actually the aliens did the job for us. By attacking a Galactic ship they sealed their own fate. As soon as we can get Corvus operational again, we’ll report what happened to the Galactics and the system will be slated for cleansing. Problem solved!”

  I frowned, but nodded and sat back down. I didn’t buy her theory concerning the colonists. They were our kin, after all, and some of them might still be around. I didn’t like the idea of telling the Galactics they should erase all life from this system.

  “Anything else?” Turov asked in a tone that indicated she didn’t want to hear any more from anyone.

  Natasha stepped up. She had a worried look on her face. “Primus, Centurion,” she said seriously. “Navigation isn’t responding. I think it’s damaged.”

  “Well then, repair it!” Primus Turov said tightly. “We should leave this system before any more rapid aliens get ideas.”

  “That’s just it, sir. I don’t think we have enough time left to effect repairs.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “The ship has changed course. I can only think that the invaders did it—or maybe it was the Skrull in a last ditch attempt to screw their killers…I don’t know, really.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Specialist?” Turov said.

  “Sorry sir,” Natasha said, straightening her spine visibly. “I will attempt to be clear. This ship is flying directly toward Zeta Herculis—the star itself—and I can’t change course because the helm controls have been damaged.”

  “How long do we have?” Graves asked, joining the conversation.

  “Seventeen hours according to the nav computer. Maybe twice that if we can get some braking jets to fire.”

  “Do what you can,” Graves said. He turned and regarded the projected image of Turov, who looked stunned.

  “This changes everything, Primus. I’ve just sent a priority code text to Tribune Drusus. He wants to talk to us in person.”

  Turov’s teeth flashed. It wasn’t a smile; it was more like a snarl. But she controlled herself, and her lips quickly closed into a thin line.

  “Excellent. That’s exactly what I would have done. Please move your unit off the bridge except for the tech. I’ve already sent our best people to help. They’ll take over. With any luck, we’ll turn this ship away from the star.”

  “Moving out, sir,” Graves said.

  After that, we were hustling down long, damaged passageways. Worried-looking techs hurried past us going the other way. They looked at the floating dead and frozen sprays of blood apprehensively.

  I hoped for all our sakes they could repair the ship’s systems before it was too late.

  -10-

  Natasha was a good tech. Too good. She’d called it down to the hour. By the time the rest of the techs agreed, we only had thirteen precious hours left before we slammed into the local star.

  It was already getting hotter aboard ship. Fortunately, we’d started off somewhere around negative two hundred degrees Celsius. Now that we were moving closer and closer to the central star, the temperature was naturally rising. At first, this would feel good…but in the end we’d burn up.

  There was nothing that the techs could do to change our course. The aliens had been very thorough and from all indications the sabotage had been deliberate.

  “It makes a strange sort of sense,” I told Carlos
later when we reached the mess hall.

  “How’s that?”

  We’d taken showers, been issued new inner smart-cloth suits by the dispensers, and then been sent clanking along the passages in full armor to get some chow while we could. We still had no idea how the brass was going to handle the situation. I didn’t think they did, either.

  “They attacked the ship as suddenly as they could,” I said. “They took Corvus out fast and scuttled it. Maybe they figured the Galactics would never find out what happened and they’d get away with this violation.”

  “You think that makes sense?” demanded Carlos with a nervous laugh. “None of this makes any sense. It’s crazy. The squids are crazy, and our officers are crazier. Together they’ll get us all permed in the end, you watch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Carlos put down his fork which had a chunk of pork and beans on the end. At least the food had been pressed into the general shape, color and texture of pork and beans. They hadn’t quite gotten the taste right, unfortunately.

  He leaned close to me and spoke in a rough whisper. “I mean, my challenged friend, that it’s frigging obvious what we should do. We have to abandon ship.”

  “And just let Corvus crash into the star?”

  Carlos shrugged. “Better than letting us all die.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “We should revive the Skrull and give them a shot at repairing the ship. After all, it’s their vessel.”

  Carlos had picked up his fork again. He waved it at me admonishingly. “There you go, thinking up High Crimes again.”

  “Doing something to save yourself can’t be a crime.”

  “Ha! Sure it can, dumbass!”

  According to Carlos, if they ever put my brain into a monkey’s skull the monkey would walk backwards. His natural personality was often amusing, but not when I was stressed. I struggled with an urge to throw my pork and beans into his face. If I’d thought it would get him to shut up, I’d have done it. The miserable food wouldn’t have been a big loss.