officer until she’d been promoted to captain and given command of the
She’d also been a friend.
“Controller,” Koenig said.
“Yes, sir.” The controller was Commander Vincent Reigh, and he was responsible for directing all fighters and other secondary spacecraft operating in
“Have all fighters concentrate on target…” He paused to read the code group off the tac display. “Target Charlie-Papa One.” Charlie because it was the probable enemy command ship, Papa for a planetoid converted into a warship, and One because it was the most massive vessel so far spotted within the enemy fleet.
“All fighters to target Charlie-Papa One, aye, aye, Admiral.”
Right now, most of
Silent detonations continued to pulse and strobe throughout the Turusch fleet, but more and more were concentrating on the enemy command vessel. So damned little was known about Turisch combat psychology, even after the disasters at Arcturus Station and Everdawn. If the carrier group could decapitate the enemy by taking out that Charlie-Papa…would that be enough to send the rest of them running?
White light filled heaven outside
“Transmission percentage at sixty-one percent, Admiral.”
As the Confederation fleet attempted to interfere with the enemy command vessel’s ability to transmit orders to other Turusch vessels, the Turusch were attempting to do the same, blasting away at
But that was changing quickly as the two fleets moved toward the merge…
“There! To the left!”
“God be praised! I see him.”
The UT-84 battlefield hopper, a stubby, blunt-nosed tri-wing, canted sharply to port and descended. Its outer hull nanoflage shifted to reflect the murky night, the utility craft’s gravs howling as they bit through the thick atmosphere. Powerful spotlights stabbed down through the gloom, centering on a lone figure struggling atop a low rock outcropping. The guy appeared to be nearly smothered beneath a shifting, oozing mass of darkness.
“Shit! What
“We call them shadow swarmers. His e-suit
Lieutenant Charles Ostend gave his passenger a sidelong glance, then shook his head. God willing? Muhammad Baqr was okay as collies went, but he shared the religious passion of all of the other Mufrids. The God- shouting fundy colonists on this miserable rock were utterly beyond his comprehension with their conviction that
Hell, why anyone would voluntarily choose to live in such a place in the first place was a question Ostend and his buddies in the 4th SAR/Recon Group had discussed endlessly in after-hours bull sessions ever since the Marines had landed and set up the perimeter. That had been…what? Five weeks ago? He checked his internal calendar. Yeah. Thirty-seven days.
Shadow swarmers? He’d not heard the term before, but it made as much sense as anything else on Ate a Boot. They’d homed in on a military distress transmission-a rescue beacon in a downed flier’s e-suit. They’d found him…but the guy was almost smothered by a mass of dark gray, leaf-shaped things. Ostend had the impression of millions of cockroaches, each bigger than a man’s outstretched hand and fingers.
He shuddered as he brought the SAR hopper’s nose high and gentled toward bare rock. He hated roaches, had an almost phobic fear of the things, and he didn’t want to think about what was going through that downed pilot’s mind right now.
The guy
“Okay,” Ostend said, uncertain. “How do we get to him?”
“We pull him inside,” Baqr told him. “The local life forms cannot tolerate high concentrations of oxygen.”
“Hey, Doc!” he called over the craft’s intercom. “We’ve got him in sight! But there’s a bit of a complication!”
“Doc” was a Navy corpsman, HMC Anthony McMillan, riding on the hopper’s cargo deck aft.
“What complication, Lieutenant?” McMillan replied.
“He’s covered with local crawlies. We need to pull him out of there. Mohammed says the oxygen in our air mix’ll kill them.”
“We’ll get him,” McMillan said. “Just get us there.”
The hopper’s two angled ventral wings folded up and rotated back out of the way as landing skids extended, and the craft gentled down ten meters from the writhing mass of swarmers. The port-side cargo-bay door irised open, and two men in Marine utility e-suits and armor jumped out, jogging toward the downed man, the spiders strapped to their backs flexing and working against the planet’s gravity. As they moved through the spotlight beams ahead of the hopper, exaggerated shadows shifted and flickered through dust-illumined shafts of light.
Ostend and Baqr watched from the hopper’s cockpit, keeping the external lights centered on the writhing figure atop the low rock outcrop. One of the corpsmen began pulling swarmers off the man’s suit, peeling them off by the fistful and flinging them away into the darkness. The other was plugging something into the pilot’s helmet.
“What are those swarmer things doing to him, anyway?” Ostend asked.
“Trying to eat him, of course,” Baqr said with a shrug. “Or, rather, trying to eat his e-suit. They must have become sensitized to the carbon in his e-suit.”
“They eat carbon?”
Baqr gave him a mild look. “So do you and I. The life on Eta Bootis is carbon-based, as is the life on Earth. And carbon-based life requires sources of carbon for growth and metabolism. Most of the mobile life forms here get the carbon from carbonaceous mineral deposits-they are lithovores. The sessile forms get it from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere-lithoautotrophs.”
“So, just like plants and animals on Earth.”
“Only by very rough analogy. The mobile forms, the swarmers, are more like Earth’s plants, actually, getting what they need from the soil. Very
Mohammed Baqr, Ostend knew, was a xenobiologist, one of the senior scientists in the Mufrid colony on Haris, so he must know what he was talking about. It sounded crazy, though-
“Can they get through his suit?”
“Eventually. Swarmers possess grinding plates within their ventral orifices, very hard, like organic diamond. The carbon nanoweave fiber of our e-suits is extremely tough, but eventually the grinding will wear through, yes. We’ve lost several of our people to the swarms.”
