Brink of Destruction, page 33
“Acknowledged, Special Tasks One Six,” Commander Fox replied. “Heavies moving up.”
Bannon pointed to Summ, who hit the control to cycle the lock. The outer door slid shut, eclipsing the wave of docking assault shuttles, and they were committed.
***
While the starships arced back toward the brown dwarf—those of them that still had power after the battering they’d taken from the ghost ships—with the 33rd Regiment in the lead, the Corvanite main force descended on the station. Starfighters continued their runs on suspected weapons emplacements and docking bays. While First, Second, and Third Special Tasks Phalanxes had penetrated three of the docking bays, Second having taken heavy casualties, Third was already deep inside the superstructure, and First pushed out of the airlock and into the strange maze of tunnels and chambers inside the station.
***
Summ and Rossiter paused at the next opening. Bannon held just behind Summ’s shoulder, his muzzle pointed toward the wall of the tunnel, and checked the rest of the stack. The quiet was grating on him. Comms were dead past line of sight, but there was enough air in the station to hear fighting somewhere in the distance. It was far enough away, though, that it was only a distant rumble.
The chrono inside his helmet told him they had been moving inward from the docking bay for less than thirty minutes. It felt far longer than that, especially as they hadn’t taken contact again. He knew the full fury that the rest of the regiment had intended to bring to bear on the station, but it seemed unlikely that they’d gotten past the entirety of the alien defenders.
They hadn’t even seen any more of the aliens, though some small automatons had scuttled away as they’d approached through the tunnels. Rossiter had shot several of them, until Summ told him to stop wasting ammunition.
Bannon checked the “map” in his visor, as sketchy as it was. They were still moving in roughly the right direction, so far as they’d been able to determine, though any layout of the station had been pure guesswork. It wasn’t quite like the interior of the ghost ships, and Bannon had to admit that if it had not been for the neutrino signature, which even the strange shielding effect of the bulkheads couldn’t mask, he’d have no way to know where they were supposed to go, and they’d have been hopelessly turned around shortly after leaving the bay. But according to the tracker in his helmet, they were getting closer.
There were irregularly spaced membranous bulkheads closing off parts of the tunnels. Bannon hadn’t seen them before, but he suspected they were there as precaution against the debris in this system, micrometeorites or even larger threats, especially this close to the brown dwarf. Summ was currently working on the latest one, while the rest of the phalanx held security up and down the tunnel, which curved oddly.
The combination of these strange curves that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, at least to human minds, the dark materials of the station, and the sourceless blue glow all contributed to a degree of disorientation. In addition, the entire structure seemed to occasionally swell and contract, though physical contact always confirmed that nothing was actually moving.
Bannon was beginning to suspect that the aliens saw a different part of the spectrum from humans.
Summ got the membrane open, and a bolt snapped out and took Rossiter in the chest. He flew backward, his armor smoking, though he got a burst of six-millimeter through the opening before a second bolt slammed into his helmet under the mandible. He went head over heels then, going limp as dark, smoking blood bubbled from the wound.
Bannon and Summ were already shooting, though Summ had needed to duck out of the way to keep from getting knocked sideways by Rossiter’s body. Bannon took the first suited alien with five rounds, as fast as he could squeeze the trigger. He was up against the tunnel wall, so he didn’t even bother with the centerline buttstock pocket. The recoil pushed him back against the wall, but he got all five rounds into the egg-shaped torso and into its segmented collar. The first couple of rounds were stopped by the slightly armored suit material, but the next three punched home, sending the alien spinning away like Rossiter, spilling blue globules into the air.
Summ slammed half his magazine into the second alien even as he thrust downward with his maneuvering pack, allowing the next bolt to smack glowing chips off the wall just above his head. The alien folded in on itself as Summ’s bullets tore through its minimal armor, and it floated back down the tunnel from where it had come, curled up like a stricken insect.
Bannon didn’t pause, leaving Rossiter to Medic Tassandas, though he was already pretty sure the man was dead. He thrust through the opening, leading with his muzzle, and checked the location of the neutrino source they were fairly sure was the station’s power plant.
The others followed, weapons up. It was almost a relief to have taken contact again. So far, there was no sign that the aliens were activating any self-destruct, like they had over Zhogalgan, but that was also why First Special Tasks Phalanx’s mission was so vital.
The neutrino source was close. And as they came to an intersection with another tunnel that curved sharply to either side, Bannon was pretty sure they’d reached their objective. Almost.
“First, on me, to the left. Second, hold right. Third, you have the rear.” It almost didn’t need to be said. They flowed through the opening and started moving, maneuvering jets puffing with little pops in the weightless passageway.
There was nothing much to distinguish this passage from all the others, except that after a couple of yards, Bannon was sure it was bigger than the one they’d come out of. That disorienting lighting and geometry was having its effect again. After another couple yards, he was sure of it. This was easily the same size as the larger passages that heavy construct had come out of back at the bay.
That was not calculated to make any sane man feel any better, especially since the phalanx was on their own and without heavy weapons.
He shook off the thought as he drifted down the passageway, Summ and Usten to his right and left. They’d find a way to crack one of those monstrosities when the time came. Especially if they could close the distance.
“Looks like we’re in the right place, sir.” Usten had his rifle pointed at the outline of a portal on the inside of the curve.
Unlike all the other portals in the ghost ships and station alike, this one didn’t look like a membrane. There was a defined seam around it and another through the center, and the material was more like the rest of the construction, pebbly and dark, and far harder than the membranes, even the tougher ones in the large airlock back at the docking bay.
It looked like a blast door.
Bannon nodded. “Looks like you’re right, Usten.” He used his thrusters to brake, then pivoted around in midair, though he still didn’t turn his back on the curving passage ahead. “Security up to the other side. Breaching charges to the portal. Stack up.”
Summ’s warriors moved quickly. They’d rehearsed this over and over aboard ship on the way into the system, though even with Ransjunan’s help, the layout they’d have to deal with had only ever been guesswork. Now that they were actually aboard the station, it was different, but they’d tried enough permutations that no one fumbled the movement, and in seconds they were stacked up while Adkins and Lukas set the cutting charge.
That was the unknown. Bannon had seen ghost ship construction take some serious punishment, and they had no idea how thick the blast doors on that portal were. But they had what they had. Fortunately, the breaching charges were more of a backup.
He pointed to the faintly glowing panel near the doors on the wall. “Summ, try the panel.”
It was a long shot, and they all knew it. The odds that the aliens would use the same code for the airlocks and the power reactor were slim. While it seemed increasingly as if this installation wasn’t prepared to repulse a full-scale assault, basic security was still basic security.
Summ tapped at the panel, trying to replicate the pattern that Hern had figured out at the lock, even though none of the men present could read the alien glyphs projected on the pad. He shook his head and tried again. The doors still didn’t budge.
The sergeant tilted his head, thinking, but Bannon interrupted him. “No time. The code doesn’t work. On to Plan B.” He pointed at Lukas. “Breach in five, four, three, two…”
At the ‘t’ of two, Lukas slammed his fist down on the igniter. The cutters lit a split second later, smoke pouring from the casings as the shaped charges poured plasma into the doors.
Without knowing the exact mechanism, they’d arranged the cutters in a rough rectangle, in such a way that—should they make it all the way through—they’d punch a portal straight through the door, allowing the Corvanites to make entry. Trying to disable all the potential locks on the blast doors would require a lot more charges, and might not even work.
The cutters were relatively unsophisticated, as such devices went. Other powers in the galaxy had breaching devices that could precisely measure the thickness and physical properties of the wall or door they were planted on, and dole out just enough energy to cleanly cut the desired opening. Corvanite cutters were less expensive and far more robust, taking much more of a brute-force approach.
Yet even as the cutters detonated with a visible shudder, making the blast door warp and the material around the charges glow, Bannon found he doubted that they’d done the trick. The door looked slightly warped, smoke coming from the glowing patches around the cutters, but the rectangle was still positioned.
He was already starting to look for the next option when Summ maneuvered directly in front of the rectangle, pointed his boots at the door, and hit his thrusters.
He slammed into the rectangle in the door, his knees bending at the impact, but while the segment of smoking, pebbly material did move, it didn’t go flying into the compartment on the other side.
Summ didn’t get discouraged or frustrated. He just pushed off, arrested his movement with his thrusters, then slammed his feet into the door once again.
This time the section of door broke loose, spinning into the compartment beyond, though slowly, as most of the energy of Summ’s kick had been spent breaking the remaining connection with the rest of the door.
Adkins lobbed an omnibanger through the opening as Summ rebounded. They hadn’t planned on using any sort of explosive in the power compartment, but with how long the breach had taken, they couldn’t take the chance. Surprise was effectively lost, so speed, shock, and violence were going to have to substitute.
The omnibanger went off with a flash, the concussion partially funneled through the narrow hole in the blast door, the conductive mist filling the visible part of the compartment in a split second. With Summ still repositioning himself, Bannon swept past him and dove through the opening, Adkins hooking in right behind him.
Bolts of energy punched into the mist, flaring into coruscating displays of incandescent auroras as soon as they hit it, a property of the conductive obscurant that Bannon hadn’t expected. His visor dimmed immediately to compensate for the crackling corposant, giving him a partial view of one of the aliens that had fired at him. He leveled his own rifle, putting the red dot on the egg-shaped torso, and fired.
These aliens looked more armored than their compatriots elsewhere in the station, but the six-millimeter rounds slammed right through the bulky suit without even slowing down. The alien spun away, trailing blue gore, as Adkins pivoted and shot the other one that had been set up on the far side of the blast doors.
More of the phalanx poured through the opening blasted in the door, spreading out as they came. More rifles barked, cutting down the suited aliens as they tried to shoot back, their energy weapons’ bolts erupting in the omnibanger’s mist as the conductive nanoparticles disrupted the packets of charged particles. These weapons seemed to be lower power than the ones the defenders had used at the docking bay, probably due to the sensitivity of the equipment in the massive chamber.
Bannon moved out of the funnel of the doorway as he took in the layout they’d just entered, his weapon up, searching for targets. The chamber clearly had not been designed with gravity in mind. Faintly glowing workstations studded the outer wall all the way up and down, while an egg-shaped module hovered in the center, connected to the outer walls by columns that looked more grown than built.
Several more aliens were trying to take cover behind the columns. They didn’t appear to be armed, but they weren’t surrendering, either. And there were any number of things they could do if they still had access to those panels.
The Corvanites had already seen the suicidal dedication to their cause that these aliens had.
He shot the first one through the head as he rose on his thrusters, skimming the inside of the outer wall. Precision was absolutely essential now. Hitting the wrong thing in this chamber might well end their mission catastrophically in a split second.
The rest of the squad, with elements of First and Third coming in behind them, were rapidly spreading out through the chamber. Weeks of training with the maneuvering units let them fly with greater precision and control than most ground pounders might have. As Bannon led the way over the “top” of the power plant, double-tapping each alien as he spotted them, sending fountains of blue gore spinning through the chamber as the wailing siren got louder, Summ was already leading more around the other end of the dark egg, more gunfire barking from that direction.
Bannon skimmed over the limb of the reactor and saw one of the aliens clinging to a handhold near a larger panel—one actually attached to the reactor itself instead of stationed on the outer wall of the chamber—tapping at controls. Even without being able to see exactly what the alien was doing, Bannon felt his blood go cold.
Only the need to avoid any unnecessary damage to the equipment slowed him down. He put his dot on the alien’s head, paused, and squeezed off the round, just as the alien looked up at him.
The bullet punched through the bulky helmet, snapping the alien’s head back. It lost its grip on the handhold and began to cartwheel away from the panel.
Bannon jetted toward it, cursing behind clenched teeth, letting the rest of his warriors spread out and move past him, clearing the rest of the chamber. The gunfire was dying down, and bodies drifted through the open compartment, trailing globules of blue blood.
He quickly arrested his rush just in front of the panel the alien had been working at, pivoting to face it, clamping his rifle to his chest plate and reaching for the interface module. It wasn’t any prettier than the one Ransjunan had used in the Garkhut base, but it was better tuned for a human to use it. Ransjunan had spent days in transit helping to build it. He’d also argued that it would be better for him to go in with the assault force, but Commander Fox had decided against that, explaining to their Shihyanese liaison much the same thing that Bannon had said leading into the assault on the Garkhut base on Eredin IV: training and coordination were important, and Fox didn’t want the special tasks phalanxes to have to worry about Ransjunan or any of the Columbians tagging along on the boarding action.
It took a moment to find the right contacts and get the module oriented properly. Bannon had practiced and practiced with it, along with all of the squad sergeants and corporals, each of whom had their own module, which had taken some considerable logistical work just to get all the parts together, much less assembled in a way that Ransjunan thought might work.
The connectors clung to the alien material using a molecular bonding adhesive that seemed to only work intermittently. The screen lit up, but at first the display was only gibberish, as the computer module tried to make some sense of the alien programming.
This was the hard part. Bannon frowned at the shifting symbols on the display, only a few of which made sense. Ransjunan had warned them during the train-up that there were always going to be difficulties translating the programming languages. Even after some study—and the Shihyan seemed to have conducted more than anyone else—the ghost ships’ computer language was a mystery.
The screen cleared, and then readable lines in Anglisch appeared. Apparent irregularities in power output. 62% probability that overload command partially entered. Exact countermeasure unknown.
Bannon gritted his teeth. This was expected, but if the reactor—whatever form of power it generated—was on the verge of overloading or losing containment, they didn’t have time for guesswork.
Besides, guesswork might just finish the job the currently drifting, still-bleeding corpse in the radiation suit not far away had started.
He tapped a series of commands, those that had been carefully programmed and drilled during the training segment aboard the Thunderer. He was no code engineer, but he could remember the sequences that were supposed to put to work one of the experimental worm programs that the Shihyan had developed to combat the ghost ships’ computers.
Processing.
Half of the work in putting these modules together, from what Bannon had heard, had been getting Shihyanese systems, already designed to attempt to penetrate the ghost ship aliens’ systems, to translate to Corvanite controls.
Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The comm-deadening properties of the alien construction meant they were isolated here in the power generation chamber, and there was no way to know—even with the distant rumble that might have been weapons fire still going on—whether they were the only humans left on the station or not.
And the mystery of what was going on in that dark egg enclosing hellish energies that powered the station was an open question that might be answered by annihilation at any second.
Instability reduced by 52-67%. The display wasn’t promising, but this was better. Probability of catastrophic failure reduced to 11-18%.
Bannon frowned at the device. It was probably the best they could hope for, given the clash of incompatible technologies, and it did seem that they’d headed off the self-destruct command. But it still felt far from decisive. That it was the best he could hope for when it came to his mission of securing the alien power plant before it could be detonated was not comforting.
