In the end, a wave of spiders spilled out, hunting back down the passage and leaving only the less palatable armor draped over a skeleton.
“Turns out there were more than two rhino-tanks,” Captain Zanella reported. “The smart mines killed some, or at least wounded them enough that they were easy meat for the spiders. We don’t have a hard count, but there were over forty.”
“That’s an ugly number,” Bill said. He’d fought rhino-tanks before.
“Yes, sir,” Zanella replied. “But corridors are clear all the way back to the dock at this point. Well, they will be once we clear up the skeletons and all the new spiders. You can’t walk for stepping on them. Places you can’t walk for stepping on Dreen skeletons, either. And some of them are places we didn’t even hit them.”
“The Dreen ships?” Weaver asked.
“Gone,” the Marine reported. “Don’t know if they were fleeing us or the spiders or heading back for reinforcements. But they’re gone.”
“Casualties?” Bill asked, wincing.
“Eighteen KIA, four WIA,” the captain said tonelessly. “And thank you for not saying something like ‘butcher’s bill,’ sir.”
“You’re welcome,” Bill replied. “But that’s not many Marines left to hold off the Dreen.”
“The increase in spiders may make that moot, sir,” Captain Zanella pointed out. “As I reported, they’re now packing most of the corridors from bulkhead to bulkhead.”
“We have to assume that the Dreen fleet has a way of eliminating them,” Bill said. “They might have been surprised by this incident, but when the main fleet arrives, they’re going to clear the corridors. And with your handful of Marines, I don’t see a way to stop them.”
“Then the fleet has to be stopped, sir,” Zanella said. “And that would be up to you.”
“Oh, thanks so much,” Weaver replied. “Now everybody likes my guitar playing! Damnit, where in the hell is the Blade?”
“Damnit, we could have been back there two days ago,” Captain Prael swore. “I want to know what’s happening back at the anomaly!”
“The Hexosehr were adamant that we wait, sir,” the TACO pointed out unnecessarily.
“We could have picked up a group of scientists and been there by now,” the CO said. “Another six hours. The hell with this. Head for the Tree. Who knows what could be happening with Weaver in charge…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I’m a freee-eee bird, yeah!” Weaver sang, then started in on the seemingly unending guitar solo.
“Sir,” Carpenter said, setting down his drumsticks. “Sir, it’s not working!”
The thing about harmonics is that they aren’t nearly as easy as some people make them out to be. Otherwise stadiums would fall down every time there was a rock concert. The harmonic of one material is not the same as the harmonic of another material. Two materials in juncture tend to damp the harmonic effect unless there is a chord that has the destructive harmonic for both. With more materials, the harmonics become more complex.
Shattering a wineglass is easy. Shattering a wooden bridge given a small unit of marchers isn’t that tough. Shattering a space ship, especially an organic one, is much, much harder.
“This station has so much power, there has to be a way to stop these bastards,” Weaver shouted, tearing off his guitar and preparing to sling it across the room.
“Maybe we’re going at this the wrong way,” Miriam said, holding up her hand placatingly. “If you promise to never subject me to ‘Freebird’ again, I’ll explain.”
“Go ahead,” Bill replied. “But after four straight hours of that Goth and heavy metal chither, I needed some real music.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“I should make you add the entire repertoire of Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers, The Doobie Brothers, .38 Special and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, most of whom I had never heard of before today and hope to never hear of again,” Miriam said. “But I’ll hold it at ‘Freebird.’ ”
“Is there a point to all of this?” Weaver asked.
“Do you really think that somebody went to all the trouble of making something that could fluoresce gas giants and that’s all it does?” Miriam asked, waving at the window. The space beyond was now a mass of gaseous particles that could hardly be called vacuum. Oh, even if a being breathed hydrogen, argon or methane it wasn’t going to be breathable. But it was thick enough to see without the fluorescence and stretched vertically across five degrees of view. “There are over a thousand points on this Tree. The dragonflies reported that the power was coming from the points. So you think it only fires at the gas giants and only from four of them? Chosen at random?”
“Chosen from whichever is pointed at the Jovians,” Weaver said. “But go on.”
“There’s a wall of gas out there,” Miriam said. “If you could hit it with other beams, it’s going to improve the show, yes or no?”
“Yes,” Weaver said. “But the only beams…”
“Because we haven’t figured out how to get the rest to fire,” Miriam interrupted.
“That Dreen fleet is headed this way while you’re talking,” Bill said, waving at the transparent walls and the icons of the Dreen ships. “Could you get to the point?”
“That’s the point,” Miriam said. “There has to be a way to get the other beams to work.”
“They could have used any control method, ma’am,” PO Carpenter pointed out. “If somebody from, say, 1950 tried to use most of the stuff in my apartment they wouldn’t be able to. They’d need the implant stuck in my head or one like it.”
“Implants are a transitional technology,” Miriam said. “Do you use an implant to run a grav-board? Do the Cheerick use an implant to fly their dragonflies?”
“You’re saying this thing could work by telepathy?” Bill asked. “Why would it work for us? We’re not the race that built it.”
“We’re not the race that built the boards,” Miriam pointed out. “I frankly doubt that only one race used this system. It’s worth a shot.”
“Okay,” Weaver said, plucking a chord on his guitar. “Let’s all think about invisible energy beams destroying those ships. ‘Mountain High, Valley Low’?”
“Is that Lynyrd Skynyrd?” Miriam asked dangerously.
“Actually, it was a joke,” Bill said. “Your idea. You lead.”
“Conn, CIC.”
“Go, CIC,” Prael said, watching the blue star swell on the main viewer. More than two light-days away it was still a dot, but at the speed of the Blade they were going to be on it in… What the hell?
“We’re getting strange emissions from the star, Conn,” CIC reported. “Changes in stellar output… Uh…”
“CIC, if you’ll look on your viewers you’ll see that the star just winked… What the… ?”
The star had simply disappeared on the viewer for a few seconds, then reappeared. It couldn’t have been the viewer; stars in the background were still rock solid.
“All stop,” Prael said as the star winked out again. “Damnit. What the hell is going on?”
“Conn, we’re getting lots of strange readings from that solar system,” CIC said, almost plaintively. “Frankly, we can’t make anything out of it. One of our systems is saying that the star is in preliminary nova stage, sir. Another disagrees and says that it’s simply ceased fusing, reasons unknown.”