The Last Charge (The Nameless War Trilogy Book 3) (26 page)

Bielski wasn’t sure whether to envy or pity him. But when it was his turn, he fought too. Not to delay the inevitable but to reach out to touch his wife, before the blue suited aliens pushed him in and closed the hatch. He could only watch and wait, as the others were each in turn forced in. From piping in the ceiling came the hiss of gas. This is it, he thought as he closed his eyes and breathed deep. But although his eyes began to water and his throat went raw, it was nothing beyond discomfort. From outside he heard a muffled scream. It was Nastya, her box was filling with a greenish gas and she was fighting for breath. Beyond her, in the end two boxes, the men in each one were already slumped to the floor and motionless. His own discomfort forgotten, Bielski screamed Nastya’s name again and again as he beat his fists against the sides of the box. She slowly sank to the floor, fighting for breath, and finally stopped moving. When they were all obviously dead, the alien took out the bodies. As Bielski and man in the final box were dragged out, his last sight of his wife was of her being cut open for examination.

“What happened?” Caple asked.

Bielski and other the man were the first to ever return to the holding room. Bielski had no memory of arriving back there. He’d probably been catatonic for days, only slowly regaining his reason.

“You were right,” Bielski whispered to him. “We were just lab rats to them. They want to know how to kill us.”

“Then I think they’ve found it,” Caple said quietly after a while. “They’ve come and examined you several times but they have taken no one. They have learned all that they can learn from us and, God willing, we have reached the end of our usefulness to them.”

But as with so many other hopes, that wish remained unfulfilled. Apart from guards bringing food, they saw nothing of the aliens for weeks. Then once again they came for Bielski. He allowed himself to be dragged out and hoped that this time he would die. But instead of the medical lab in which Nastya perished, this time he was taken to a smaller compartment. Once secured to the wall, he was left alone. After a while he noticed the room was filled with things – human objects. Displayed on the far wall was an oil painting that had belonged to Alex Gibbons. It was hanging upside down. It wasn’t the only picture. Others were dotted about the room. They’d been taken from the cabins at Junction. Bielski let out a tortured groan as he saw one he’d known well, a picture that had decorated his own home, the one of him and Nastya on their wedding day. There were also dozens of old paper books, tools and children’s toys, scattered around the room in no discernable pattern, fragments of destroyed lives. Weeping, he didn’t hear the hatch open or the alien enter. It was only as the creature settled itself on a floor cushion that he caught sight of it. Sorrow turned to rage and with a wordless snarl of raw loathing, Bielski attempted to hurl himself at it. For all that he’d longed for death, in that moment he more than anything wanted to kill the alien. The manacle brought him up short.

“Damn you! What do you want! What is there left to take?” he screamed at it, before collapsing. Not even his seething hatred could sustain his starved body.

The alien quirked its head as it looked at him, then started to emit an odd wheezy rasp.

“Slower... of... speech,” said a computerised voice from the ceiling.

Bielski froze in place before exclaiming: “You can understand!”

“Slower... of... speech,” the computer repeated.

Bielski repeated himself, forcing himself to slowly enunciate the words.

From the sealing came alien speech. The alien listened carefully, then replied.

“Yes... with... you... speak... will... now...”

“Why have you done this to us?” It was the question that had burned them all these long months.

“To... learn...” it replied. “Young... ended... why... you... did...that?”

The alien waited patiently as Bielski worked out what it had said. Once he did his expression tightened.

“To save them from you!” he spat.

“Will... more... ending... of.... young...?”

“I do not understand.”

“Conflict... wasteful... progresses... continues...”

“A war is still being fought!”

“Correct...”

“You haven’t been able to beat us.”

“Yet...”

The brief elation he had felt was chilled by the single word. The alien took that as its cue to continue.

“Conflict... wasteful... seek... end...”

“Yes! We seek an end.”

“Positive... Require... that... to... end... bring... all... young... Produce... young... no... further... allow... we... shall... end... race... yours... without... conflict”

Kill your children! Have no more and the human race will be allowed to go extinct in peace. That was the alien’s peace proposal. He wanted to vomit.

“Why? Why do you want to destroy us? Why do you hate us?”

The alien quirked its head again, as if puzzled by the question.

“No. Hate...” it said. “Hate... wasteful... Conflict... wasteful... Galactic resources... finite... Your... resource... consumption... allowed... cannot... No hate... we... wish... to... survive... Your... existence... limits... our... time.”

The alien gestured around the room.

“Culture... history... that... is... yours... we... will... preserve... You... we... must... without... hate... destroy.”

It paused again to enter a series of commands into the computer beside it and a holo display lit up. It selected a computer file and a star map came up.

“Here... we... are,” it said pointing at one circle before moving its finger to point at a second. “You... origin... here. Speak... now... locations... of... human... worlds.”

“I will give you nothing!”

The alien pressed another control and two of the blue suited guards came in. Both carried shock batons, the nodes of each crackling menacingly.

“Resistance... wasteful,” said the first alien. The computer could give no emphasis to the words but the alien angled its head as if genuinely regretful. “Answers... must... give. False... answers... punished.”

Bielski lay on the floor. He could feel his mind working only sluggishly now. In the distance he heard an alarm sound and stirred. Caple was the only other one to move. He was now little more than a skeleton, covered by paper-thin skin. There were electrical burns all over his body where he had resisted the interrogator and his breath was raw and wheezy. There were only a dozen of them now, none more than a few days from death. The aliens continued to dole out food, but no one now had the strength to eat and the stuff simply rotted on the floor. The alarm continued to sound and he twisted to look at the hatch. Then beneath him he felt the deck give a faint shudder and the lights flickered. As Bielski raised himself up on one elbow, the deck gave a violent jolt. At the same moment there was a distant but distinct explosion. The lights flickered and this time blacked out completely, to be replaced with the dim green glow of some kind of emergency illumination. Bielski grunted. His arm had been pinned to the bulkhead by his mag-lock manacle and now, without warning, it fell away.

“What’s happening?” he whispered.

Caple shook his head in mute confusion.

Bielski lifted his hand curiously. The gravity seemed to be slowly but definitely weakening. Time passed, then in the distance they felt and heard more explosions, followed by the unmistakeable clatter of gunfire.

“It’s a rescue!” someone said in a tone of desperate hope.

The gravity was almost gone now and Caple dragged himself over the hatch to slap at it weakly.

“Help us! We’re in here! Please help us!” he called as loudly as his ravaged body could manage. Outside the sounds of gunfire continued, interspersed with the occasional bang of an explosion. Sometimes the sound of fighting seemed to diminish and they despaired, then it began to come their way.

Abruptly the hatch opened and one of the blue suited aliens loomed over Caple. In its hand it held not a shock baton but a gun, which it brought to bear. As it did so, however, there was a deafening rattle of gunfire and the alien shuddered as bullets ripped through it and blood splashed across the bulkheads. Its body drifted inwards through the hatch, beyond which Bielski caught a brief sight of a hand. A human hand – just before it threw a grenade into the chamber.

Chapter Twelve

Reconnaissance by Fire

1st April 2068
 

Willis stepped out of her cabin and was nearly flattened by a pair of dockyard workers trying to negotiate an environmental recycler down the passageway.

“Watch out!” one of them warned her in no uncertain terms.

Willis resisted the urge to bite back. They’d been waiting weeks to get
Black Prince
into dock for badly needed and extensive repairs. While not that many ships had been damaged,
Black Prince
was in the battered minority. Before the Siege of Earth began, most civilian personnel had been evacuated back to the surface and it had taken time to return them into orbit. Of course, once they did get the ship into docks, it was suddenly swarming with civilians.

They’d need to remove at least some of the ship’s crew, but Willis needed to be careful about that. Crewmen who were even only temporarily without a ship, would look very available to other captains. Transfer requests fly into Fleet Personnel and before she knew it, all of her crew’s most experienced hands would be stripped away. So at least a portion of them would have to stay on board. Hopefully the dockyard workers would remember to check the cruiser’s compartments before they started opening up its hull. That last thought crossed her mind only half jokingly and she absently tapped the canister at her leg to ensure her survival suit was in place.

Making her way out of the centrifuge, Willis headed for engineering.
Black Prince
hadn’t taken a direct hit from a cap ship missile; she doubted the ship could have survived that, but there were plenty of signs that she had taken a lot of hits from smaller projectiles. Mostly the evidence was in the form of patches of sealing foam, which was the only reason half the ship’s compartments could hold pressure and loops of cable where repairs had been spliced in to cross breakages. She found Guinness in the port side engine room, talking to an older, heavyset man with dock manager’s stripes on his sleeves.

“Flooding on a starship,” the manager muttered as he looked around. “That’s a bloody new one on me.”

“It did in a number on our electrics,” Guinness replied sourly. “We been trying to run two generators – one of them bandaged back together I might add – on one control grid.

“So I see,” the manager grunted examining his notes.

“There are still bits of radiator fluid in here – hard stuff to catch in micro gravity,” Willis said as she approached.

Guinness saluted as sharply as was possible without gravity. The foreman gave her a perfunctory nod.

“How long do you think this will take?” she asked.

The man gave a weary sigh.

“Y’know we’ve only been on this tin can for less than a full watch. We’re still doing a damage analysis and reviewing the paperwork your officers handed over.”

“Yes, but I have to forward your estimate to Fleet Headquarters,” Willis replied. “They’ll want to know when they can have their ship back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied sourly. “Don’t tell me – there’s a war on.”

He sighed and looked around again.

“Okay, we have to remove and replace most of the armour anyway, so that makes access into the ship easier. The main turrets are all intact, which is good. Within the main citadel we’re mostly talking about splinter damage. That’s not so good. The problem with splinters is that you have to start pulling things open just to make sure nothing took a ricochet and clouted something without anyone noticing. And as for your liquid problem in here…”

He paused to wave his stylus around the engine room.

“We’ll have to be really sure we’ve got that sorted. We’ll likely have to over-pressurise the deck, then pop a hatch and blow it out. We’ll need a tug on station though, to keep the platform stable. My guesstimate is four months, assuming we don’t come across any surprises.”

Willis nodded. She’d be surprised if
Black Prince
was combat worthy in fewer than six months. But better the dockyard did it properly than rush them back out only for something to crap out. Still, four months was a long time for the crew to be kept active and still part of her command.

“This would all be easier if we could put the crew off,” the manager suggested.

“It would be even easier if we hadn’t been shot at so much in the first place,” Guinness grunted.

“True. But we’ll move people around to make sure we can work without someone ending up breathing vacuum.” 

Willis’s intercom beeped and she flicked it on.

“Willis here.”

“Captain, this is officer of the day. A communication has come through from Headquarters for you – high priority.”

“Alright, I’m on my way up. Chief, there’s a few things I need to discuss with you,” before turning to the manager and adding: “Thank you. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the next few months.”

“No dockyard type ever likes to be told that by a skipper,” Guinness said as they pulled their way back towards the centrifuge.

Willis smiled.

“I know, Chief. It’s just a question of mithering them enough to get the job done fast, without being so much that they throw a sulk.”

“That’s an art,” Guinness replied as he guided himself around a ladder. “My last skipper, Crowe, he was an expert at it. He could talk a dock manager into doing something he didn’t want to do and have him convince he’d received a favour.”

There weren’t many crew on the bridge. With
Black Prince
in dock, there wasn’t much for the duty watch to do, other than be ready for any kind of an emergency.

“I’ve forwarded it to your screen at your chair, Ma’am,” the duty officer said as Willis entered the bridge.

She sat down and entered her authorisation code to access the message. Guinness was talking about some technical detail but as Willis read and reread, his voice became just a background drone.

“So I’ll need a decision on that one, Skipper,” Guinness finished.

But Willis just stared into the middle distance, her finger drumming lightly on her chair armrest.

“Skipper?” he asked carefully.

Willis had been a prickly individual when they’d first met but over the last year and a half, she’d mellowed a lot. Still, the after effects of combat could take people unexpectedly. Willis gave a long sigh and her eyes unglazed.

“I’m afraid that’s not for me to decide Chief, not any more,” she said. “I’m being relieved of command.”

When the captain of a ship was on the bridge, every one always had at least half an ear tuned to whatever they said. All extraneous noise abruptly stopped.

“A Commander Berg will be taking charge at eleven hundred hours tomorrow,” Willis continued in a slightly hollow voice. “I’m to present myself at
the
Starforge
Platform for reassignment.”

“Berg? I served with her on the old
Mississippi
,” Guinness said before sticking out his hand. “It will be a promotion,” he said firmly. “Congratulations. And by the way, I wish to request reassignment to your new command.”

The Chief was probably right. Willis thought to herself as she packed her kit for transport. Aside from the latest versions of certain gadgets, she didn’t own much. She’d never been one for physical possessions and of what she’d had, quite a bit had been lost on the old
Hood
. She didn’t even have her own home dirtside, just a storage locker. When she did land for leave, she generally stayed with either her parents or in a hotel. But now, after packing everything she had on board in less than ten minutes, Willis couldn’t help but wonder whether it was time to try to put down some kind of permanent roots and have a home that wouldn’t be taken away from her at any moment.

There was no sense in getting paranoid. She’d been a very visible part of the operation that had saved Earth. She’d made her part work, so logically, at the very least, this had to be a sideways move. But just before the war her career had been about to go off the rails. Perversely, the conflict had salvaged her prospects, although the memory of seeing her career hopes crumble had left scars every bit as deep as combat. When she read that message, her initial assumption was that it represented something bad. In some respects it was. She might be leaving her successor with a banged up ship but equally this Commander Berg was inheriting a good crew. To his disappointment, she’d had to decline Guinness’s request. She could hardly take him without knowing where
she
was going.

“I relieve you,” Commander Berg said crisply.

“I stand relieved, Ma’am,” Willis replied before saluting sharply and stepping back as the Berg turned and sat carefully down on the captain’s chair. The really important parts of command handover – transfer of computer codes and the ship’s formal papers – had happened shortly after the Commander boarded. Willis took her successor through key points she needed to be aware of, the kind of personnel issues that didn’t show up in the formal documents and all the other details a new captain needed to have. Across the ship, all work ceased while the new captain gave a short speech across the intercom. It was a fairly standard address of the sort that ticked its way through the checklist: proud to join you, thank you to the former incumbent, big shoes to fill, glorious (though in
Black Prince
’s case short) history, a hopefully glorious future…. blah, blah, blah.

It wasn’t fair to take her ill humour out on Berg. Although she’d never been good at reading people, Willis guessed her replacement had been just as surprised to be transferred as she was. From a combat worthy destroyer to a banged up Austerity probably didn’t feel like much of a promotion to Berg. The question for Willis was: what awaited her? Berg’s speech ended and the ensuing round of polite applause caught Willis by surprise, leaving her to join in belatedly.

With formalities over, it was time to leave and although Berg showed all appropriate respect, Willis could tell she was eager to see her on her way. There could only be one queen-bee in the hive.

“Good luck with your next posting, Captain,” Berg said, offering a hand as they paused at the personnel access hatch.”

“And you, Commander,” Willis replied shaking it. “Sorry I couldn’t hand her over in better condition, but at least with a new skipper, they are less likely to try to strip personnel off you as well.”

She took one final looked around before leaning in and quietly adding: “Look after them Commander.”

Built during the Contact War,
Starforge
Platform had originally been a construction dockyard. Growth in ship size had long since rendered it obsolete for that purpose and instead it had been repurposed as the fleet’s orbital administrative personnel centre. When Willis stepped off the shuttle, the place was a riot of activity. A staff officer found her about an hour after arrival and hustled her in to see Admiral Clarence, the fleet’s head of personnel.

All large organisations had a few characters in them and Admiral Clarence was one of the fleet’s. With a huge ginger moustache and an upper class English accent, he looked and sounded like he’d escaped from the early half of the previous century.

“Ah, Captain,” he said as she was shown in. “Please sit down. You look like you could do with a good cup of tea. Unfortunately I’ve never come across a good cup in orbit, so you’ll have to settle for a mediocre one. Milk? Sugar?”

“Just milk, thank you, sir.”

Once she was settled, the Admiral resumed his seat.

“I owe you an apology, Captain. One of these days I will at least
try
to give you a posting with some decent notice.” Clarence sat back in his seat. “I would imagine that your focus over the last few weeks has probably been inwards. However, I’m sure you’re aware that a significant number of ships have been deployed to perform reconnaissance beyond the Junction Line, even some to find out what’s left of Landfall, which unfortunately, I’m sure won’t be much.”

Willis nodded. The first deployments had started within a fortnight of the end of the Siege of Earth. Most ships were moving forward to re-establish the former Junction Line, but if the grapevine was to be believed, some were going much further.

“Well, in its infinite wisdom and mercy, Headquarters has decided that three small task-forces are to be sent out, not just past our former borders, but past the Centaur planet, to directly find the Nameless themselves.”

Now Willis’s interest was really peaked. After the
Mississippi Incident but before Baden, she’d been part of the original expedition to find the Nameless. They hadn’t found them but they had come across their handiwork.

“Well, as you can appreciate Captain, this is real deep space work so suitable ship classes at our disposal are fairly limited. In addition, what with the war and everything, we’ve been struggling to manage the usual circulation of postings. There are quite a few officers who’ve been in post for too long already. I needed to make some redeployments before ships get sent out on
missions that will take months.