The Mothership (31 page)

“Everything within the blast sphere,” Nuke
said. “The crater will be six kilometers across, and three deep.”

Laura tried to imagine a crater that size
where the Goyder River currently flowed. In time, it would become the world’s
deepest freshwater lake. The idea repulsed her. She glanced at Markus, who was
watching her impassively.

He knew!
She realized. That’s what he’d meant about the
military destroying what they didn’t understand. She wanted to ask him what he
thought, but she could tell from the look on his face, he wanted no such
question. Laura turned to Mulmulpa, sitting cross legged, listening to every
word. “What do you say? This is your land.”

Mulmulpa looked up toward the shield dome
hidden in the night sky. “I cannot see the spirits in the sky. It is not meant
to be this way.”

“There’s no radiation from the weapon,”
Beckman said. “No after effects. It’s clean.”

“That’s comforting,” Laura snapped. “A nuke
has already gone off. What about its radiation?”

“There’s nothing I can do about that. All I
know is that the President had to authorize that nuke. That means bad shit is
happening, and he’s telling us to use that weapon as surely as if he handed me
the order himself. Your government must have agreed, because there’s nothing
they can do to fix this. Not now.”

“Destroying this place isn’t the same as
protecting it.”

“It’ll recover,” Beckman said. “It may take
a hundred years or a thousand, but it will recover. But if we don’t knock that
ship out now, we may not be here in a year.”

Laura wanted to scream, but it would change
nothing. Everything her life had stood for to that moment was being torn apart.

Bandaka approached her. “We belong to the
land. If the land survives, we do too.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Beckman said,
turning toward Mulmulpa who nodded slowly.

Laura sighed. “How close are you going to
take that thing, before you set it off?”

“We’re going to shove it up their ass,”
Tucker declared malevolently.

“Yeah!” Nuke exclaimed, “Biggest freaking
enema in history!”

Beckman nodded. “We have to get close
enough for the ship to be inside the blast sphere.”

“What about my husband? He’s on that ship.”

“This was never a rescue mission,” Beckman
replied with a hint of sympathy.

She glanced at Markus, who remained quietly
uncommitted. “That’s it then.”

On the far side of the camp, a weak moan
sounded. Virus rolled sideways, slowly bringing a hand up to his pounding head.
He opened his eyes, blinking weakly. Xeno rushed to him, placing a hand on his
shoulder reassuringly. He groaned, then mumbled several incomprehensible words
in a voice straining to reach a high pitch beyond his physical capabilities.
Everyone stared at him in astonishment.

His words were of a language unknown to
Man.

* * * *

“Sonar contact,
bearing one seven five degrees, speed–” the sonar operator cut off as his mind
struggled to grasp what his instruments were telling him.

Captain Bourke turned toward the operator
curiously. “Speed?”

The sonar operator gave the captain of the
USS
Michigan
a confused look. “Over two thousand knots, sir, submerged!”

“That’s impossible!” Commander Thompson
snapped as he started toward the sonar operator’s console.

“Heading?” The captain demanded.

“Straight for us!”

“Battle stations,” the captain ordered.
“Launch countermeasures.”

The XO leaned passed the sonar operator,
peering to see a fluorescent line streak across the screen toward the
Michigan
.
“There must be something wrong with your instruments.”

The sonar operator ran his eye over his
controls doubtfully. “I don’t think so, sir.”

Captain Bourke took up position on the
other side of the sonar operator, reaching for the operator’s head set. He
pressed one of the speakers to his ear, listening. Instead of the familiar
sound of high speed propellers cavitating through the water, he heard barely a
whisper. It was the sound of water particles being pushed aside by an
acceleration field that ensured the speeding object never actually touched the
water, even though it was cruising hundreds of meters below the surface.

“It’s not a torpedo,” the captain muttered
as he watched the line streak toward them. “Hard a port, seventy degrees!”

Before the massive submarine began to turn
the silver ellipsoid struck the
Michigan
amidships, plunging into its
nuclear reactor and detonating. For a moment, the dark depths of the ocean
burned with the radiance of a star, then the sea water collapsed into the empty
airless void that had formed where SSGN 727 had been. There was no wreckage, no
surge of bubbles or debris, no hope of survivors.

The
USS Michigan
had been
annihilated at a molecular level.

* * * *

Markus borrowed
Tucker’s entrenching tool as the team made last minute preparations before
moving out. Leaving camp with an entrenching tool indicated he was going to
attend to his morning needs in the absence of a proper latrine, and ensured he
wouldn’t be followed. He caught Laura’s eye, and nodded for her to follow, then
once out of sight of the troops, he drew his transceiver and typed quickly:

Request:

1. Rationale for use of nuclear weapons.

2. Confirmation of mission priorities.

Urgent. Beckman planning to deliver
payload.

He knew Nuke had been receiving nothing on
the radio, and the dome’s ability to filter out a nuclear blast’s EMP made him
doubt anyone would receive his signal, but he had to try. The DSD team were
barely a hundred kilometers away and their equipment was extremely sensitive,
so he hoped they would pick up some trace of his signal.

“Are you going to let them do it?” Laura
demanded.

Markus glanced to his left, this time not
surprised that he hadn’t heard her approach. She stood with hands on hips and
an angry look on her freckled face.

“I haven’t decided.”

She nodded to the transceiver in his hand.
“Getting anything?”

“Not yet. I may have to make a judgment
call.” He gave her a questioning look. “Can I count on you?”

Laura looked surprised. “Me? What do you
want me to do?”

“I’ll let you know.” He waited. “Well?”

She realized he might be her husband’s only
hope. “You can, if you stop them destroying that ship with my husband inside.”

“Good.” Markus drove the entrenching tool
into the ground, levering up a spade full of dirt. He glanced at Laura. “That’s
all.”

She felt mildly irritated that she was
being dismissed, as if she was in Markus’ employ. Without a word, she turned
and headed back to camp. When Markus finished digging a shallow hole, he
checked the transceiver.

Its gray LCD screen remained blank.

The heavy lift
suit flashed a priority alert into one of
Nemza’ri’s
cerebral implants.

She ignored it, focusing instead on gently
lowering the damaged transport cell she held onto the med lab floor. It was the
third functioning cell she’d found with her suit’s biosensor. Each rescue gave
her hope, even though the cell’s occupants all suffered from terrible burns,
and would require months of nano regeneration to recover. The miracle was that
the cells themselves had survived, shielding the occupants from the worst of
the heat, even after their outer shells had melted.

She released the octagonal transport cell
and stepped back. It was scarred black and splattered with droplets of molten
metal, now cooled, but its inner walls had not collapsed. By a stroke of luck,
the cell’s artificial awareness had survived and managed to keep the biostasis
field operating under the cell’s own emergency power. The cell’s power module
was damaged and wouldn’t last much longer, something the cell’s awareness was
constantly screaming at her as it struggled to keep its precious occupant
alive.

She flashed a signal through the suit’s
communicator, summoning six spherical, multi-armed med drones. The med drones
erected a mobile stasis field around the transport cell, then transferred the
charred occupant to a regrowth chamber. Once inside, millions of nano machines
swarmed around the blackened body, passing between dead skin cells to work
directly on ruined organs at a cellular level. The nano machines functioned
less efficiently inside a stasis field, but could perform even the most
delicate of operations when supervised by the vastly more capable med drones.
The automated medical team replaced hundreds of damaged nano implants and
amputated all of the patients limbs in preparation for regrowth. Once he was
stabilized, they would determine if they could save his body, or would have to
construct a cloneform for a brain-consciousness transplant. It was a dangerous
procedure, and would only be carried out if there was no way to rebuild the
patient’s original bioform.

The med drones identified the patient by
his DNA, informing Nemza’ri of his identity. He was a mid level ground unit
commander, not scheduled for revival until planetfall plus two. Technically, he
outranked her, but not being crew meant in matters of the ship he was no more
than cargo, and being male, he would always defer to her irrespective of grade.
While she was glad she’d found another survivor, her inability to find a ship’s
officer worried her. Being the only surviving crew member meant she was in
command of the ship, even if the Command Nexus refused to recognize her rank.
Saving passengers was her duty, but she desperately hoped to find one of her
more senior sisters to take command.

When the med drones had stabilized the
patient, they shut down the portable biostasis field and allowed the regrowth
chamber’s own life support system to take control of the patient’s metabolic
processes. The med drones informed her that he would survive, but would be
unconscious for many weeks. Knowing there was nothing more she could do, she at
last turned her attention to that annoying alert that kept sounding deep inside
her brain. She’d assumed it was a malfunction, but her training and discipline
wouldn’t allow her to cancel it until she’d followed the required termination
protocols. To her amazement, she discovered it was not a system failure, but a
genuine combat alert being transmitted throughout the ship.

She listened with growing concern as she
discovered the deployment shield had been struck by a low yield fusion weapon! She
wondered who could possibly be firing at them. And who would dare to use such
outlawed weapons? They were universally hated by all sentient species, and the
consequences of building, let alone using such weapons, were too severe to contemplate.

With the ship under attack, and fighting
for its survival, her perspective changed.

She was no longer struggling to save
survivors. She no longer doubted the chain of command, or feared her part in
it. The Command Nexus was trying to defeat an enemy she knew nothing about, an
enemy that had tried to destroy the ship while it was helpless. As was the way
of her kind, she was now driven to commit herself totally and selflessly to the
defense of the ship.

Nemza’ri used the suit communicator to ask
the med drones one question. They informed her that two of the male survivors
were viable, but they needed growth hormones. The ship carried a number of myrnods,
an aggressive, predatory creature native to her homeworld that secreted the
needed hormone, but to look for those creatures meant temporarily abandoning the
search for survivors. The myrnods had been stored in several locations to
ensure they would not all be lost if the ship was damaged, so there was a
chance some could have survived.

She requested a tactical update through the
channel that had supplied the combat alert. The response was immediate: the
Command Nexus had been suppressing orbital and atmospheric defenses since
landing and had mounted punitive operations to secure the area. No contact had
been established with Fleet for many days, threat levels were high and
reinforcement unlikely. Enemy action was also interdicting supply, further
retarding recovery operations.

That settled it. She had to find the myrnods.
If there were any more survivors, they would have to wait. She was crew, she
was nominally in command and she knew her duty.

Most importantly of all, she was female.

Vamp led Dr
McInness and Timer toward the circle of light marking the end of the tunnel
from the destroyed mantle mine, periodically glancing at the crystal ball’s
display surface. The recovered scanner indicated no contacts, yet she couldn’t
believe there were no guards. She pocketed the scanner as she crept towards the
mouth of the tunnel and raised her gun. A smooth rock floor several football
fields in length stretched out before her, beneath a cavernous chamber that
rose through several kilometers of rock to a barely visible gray ceiling.

She glanced back into the deep shadows
behind her. “Wait there, Doc,” she said, motioning for Timer to follow.

Timer hesitated until a sharp look from her
forced him forward. He drew his special, but remained several paces behind as
she stepped out onto the fused rock floor. Her footsteps clicked hollowly on
the glassy surface while the vast emptiness towering above made her feel
insignificant. To her right was the dark opening of the second tunnel leading
back to the mantle mine, while a featureless rock wall stretched away to the
left.

“This must be where they unload the
transports, but then what?” She sensed the chamber was too large to simply be a
terminus for the mine, yet there was nothing to indicate its greater purpose.

“They must be going to build something in
here,” Timer said from the tunnel entrance.

Vamp finished surveying the floor of the
chamber, finding no sign of an exit on the smooth rock walls. “Looks like the
end of the road,” she said, wondering if they were trapped.

She looked up, following the chamber’s
walls past yellow-orange light panels ten meters above the floor, to the dark
gray rectangular ceiling far above. The ceiling’s only feature was several
white points of light, too distant to determine what they were. She aimed her
M16 at the lights, using its ACOG telescopic sight to resolve the dots into
small circular openings.

“Oh shit!” she murmured.

“What is it?” Timer whispered anxiously.

“We’re under it!”

“Under what?” Dr McInness demanded.

“The ship! I can see open hatches.”

“Really?” Dr McInness asked excitedly as he
rushed past Timer, unable to contain his curiosity any longer. He looked up,
trying to gauge the distance to the gray metallic underside of ship’s hull. “My
God, it’s huge!”

“Not what you expected?” Vamp asked,
unclipping her telescopic sight and passing it to him.

Dr McInness scowled as he peered through
the low power lens. “I think we got our calculations wrong!”

“Oh really?” Vamp asked.

“It’s much bigger than we thought.”

Timer looked up apprehensively. “I knew it.
We’re trapped!”

Dr McInness handed the telescopic sight
back to Vamp, then wandered across the floor, staring up at the gray hull,
frustrated he couldn’t get closer. “There must be a way–”

A white beam flashed down from above and
enveloped the scientist. Without any sensation of movement, he found himself
shooting up through a shaft of light. Vamp and Timer fell away rapidly,
shrinking to tiny dots in seconds, while the glistening rock walls flashed past
in a blur. He entered one of the circular openings, slowing as he passed
through the hull’s three thick layers. He popped up inside a cavernous space
shrouded in shadows, then he was swept sideways and deposited on a polished
metal deck. The transport beam winked out, leaving him blinking in near
darkness. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted, he began to appreciate the vast nature
of the deck. A few dim yellow-orange lights flickered against a wall, struggling
to survive on a faltering power supply, while the other walls were lost in
darkness hundreds of meters away.

He turned slowly around, feeling small and
alone in a giant’s lair. The deathly quiet was periodically broken by a distant
clang of metal on metal, resonating to him through the great ship’s
superstructure.

Repairs?
he wondered as he turned toward one of the four
circular openings in the deck. Suspended high above each hatchway was a gray
machine fitted with a translucent conical projector. He approached the hatchway
cautiously and peered down into the rock shaft he’d just ascended. Its bottom
appeared to be a tiny square of light far below, bordered by rock walls obscured
by darkness. He felt his head spin with vertigo and stepped back, then one of
the conical projectors glowed to life, pushing back the night. A transport beam
flashed down into the chamber, then Vamp appeared above the hatchway and was
carried sideways to the deck. The beam blinked out, leaving her standing in the
spot Dr McInness had vacated, blinking to focus. She leveled her M16, turning
quickly full circle to check for possible attack.

“We’re alone,” Dr McInness assured her,
then a distant metallic clang sounded. “Except for that.”

She studied her surroundings, looking up
curiously at the conical device hanging above the hatch.

“It’s a cargo handling system. That’s how
they get the metal ingots up here.”

She glanced thoughtfully at the open
hatchway. It was far larger than was necessary to bring small metal cubes into
the ship. “And move stuff down there.”

“What stuff?”

“Stuff they didn’t want us to know about,
until they jump out of the ground. You’ve seen how fast they build tunnels. We
could never get down that deep if we had to stop them.”

“Stop them from doing what? I don’t see
much happening around here now that Beckman blew up their mine!”

Vamp looked around for the shipment of
ingots they’d seen depart the mine terminus. “So where’s the metal?”

“I guess they used it already.”

Timer appeared above the cargo hatch, and
was placed on the deck beside Vamp. “Cool ride! Now let’s get the hell out of
here.”

The faint sound of another distant metallic
impact rang through the ship, then faded before they could guess how far away
its source was.

Timer glanced into the cargo hatch he’d
just passed through, spat into the void, and watched as his spittle sailed
through the air into the shadows below. “Watch that first step!”

Vamp noticed the thick triple hull, several
hundred meters thick. “That’s a big hull.”

“It’s a big ship,” Dr McInness said.

“It looks like armor.”

“So what if it is? The ship has to deal
with radiation, meteorites, who knows what else.”

Vamp shrugged. “I’m just saying, it looks
kind of . . . tough.”

Dr McInness stared at the hull layers
visible through the open hatchway, then motioned towards the empty space around
them. “It looks like an empty cargo ship to me. The hull probably gives it
structural strength.”

Vamp ran her eye over the four circular
cargo hatches curiously. “Where are the doors?”

“Could be an iris, like the beetle’s
hatch.”

Timer glanced at his compass, seeking a
bearing to follow, but was dismayed to discover the needle spun slowly. “My
compass is screwed.”

“May I?” The scientist asked, holding out
his hand.

Timer handed the compass to Dr McInness,
who moved it toward the deck, testing its sensitivity to the metal. The needle
continued to spin slowly in the same direction, irrespective of how close it
was to the deck. “It’s not the hull. There must be an electromagnetic field
inside the ship. Maybe the engines are working?”