Slowly, as slowly as the laws of physics allowed, they closed in.
“We are getting some electromagnetic activity,” the chief reported at two hundred thousand klicks. “It’s in the form of low-powered electric servo motors. They’re very weak and not much of them. The kind of things we use for minimum life support.”
“So someone might be alive?”
“Possibly, on what’s left of the space station.”
“Give me a picture,” Kris ordered.
Kris knew space stations. She’d blown up at least one and fought to save another. A cylinder was the usual design for them. A simple tin can in space.
This one was no exception.
Or at least it had started as no exception.
Now. Not so much.
Unless the aliens had intentionally built a twisted and malformed cylinder, this station had suffered a catastrophic failure. It was easy to see why.
In a dozen or more places, the hull looked singed, burned by the venting of superheated plasma that these spaces on the hull had not been designed to contain. The vent points showed signs of wreckage drifting by them or hanging on by a thread.
No wonder it had been so hard to get a decent picture of the alien base. Its very death had cloaked it in a veil of destruction.
“Where is the activity?” Kris asked.
“In the extreme forward section of the cylinder,” Professor Labao said. “The area farthest from a vented reactor.”
Nelly highlighted that section. It was well away from the self-destruction of the reactors. While the other end of the station appeared to be completed and done with, this end still showed where construction had been going on.
Had some low-caste workers there chosen life over death? The odds were long against it. But a mother and father had chosen life for themselves and their two babies once in Kris’s experience. Only the babies had survived, but still, of the almost hundred billion aliens Kris had slaughtered, at least two had chosen life.
“Captain Drago, I believe the Wasp has the best armor left after the last fight.”
“Yes, we’re at eighty-five percent,” Captain Drago reported. “Why?”
“Let’s leave the rest of the squadron at this distance. Set the strongest Condition Zed you can on the Wasp and nose in there. If I were you, I’d keep my engines away from them for the first pass,” Kris said, “but what do I know? I’m just the admiral.”
“And the bloody Longknife,” Drago muttered under his breath. Almost.
Kris didn’t hear him. Very carefully, she didn’t hear.
The squadron swung wide of the moon while the Wasp crept closer, if a ship traveling at a hundred thousand klicks an hour relative to the huge gas giant looming over them all could be said to creep.
They were fifty thousand klicks out when the aliens made their move.
55
“We’ve been pinged! Radar!”
Bridge personnel are supposed to be very informative, but circumspect, in their reports. They are never supposed to shout their reports. Sad to say, old Chief Beni failed to follow proper decorum at that moment.
He was definitely shouting.
“There’s also communication from the station to the warship wrecks!”
There was no need to order battle stations. Everyone was already there. The Wasp even had an admiral at the Weapons station. There was also no need to order a flip of the ship. The frigate was on a nose-forward course, anyway.
NELLY, JINK.
I’M DOING IT, KRIS, BUT WE’VE ONLY GOT THRUSTERS TO PLAY WITH. THERE’S NOT MUCH I CAN DO.
Nevertheless, in her high-gee egg, Kris felt the side movement as Nelly slid to the left, then dropped the ship down.
On her board, Kris held the lasers ready, but she had no target.
Nothing moved.
Captain Drago had arranged his approach so that only one of the warships was over the horizon of the alien station. Kris searched it for a target.
“Enemy lasers are powering up and coming to bear,” Nelly reported.
“Kill them,” Kris ordered.
Laser 1 on the Wasp’s bow shot out a stuttering blast of light. On the hulk, a section of hull exploded.
But there was more movement visible on the dinged, seared, and dented hull. Faster than human thought, Nelly popped one, then another, then four. Finally, she used all seven lasers.
A missile tried to launch from the dead ship. Nelly nailed it before it cleared its launcher. The explosion wrecked several other launchers.
Kris was fighting a zombie. It shambled and shook and tried to kill her with every twitch. The Wasp fought back with the clear, intelligent intent of every human and computer aboard her who loved life and intended to keep living.
Almost as suddenly as it had started, it was over. In what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a blink, the dead ship was truly dead.
The bridge crew took a second to recover their breath.
“What do we do with the other ship?” Captain Drago asked.
“I’d love to send a couple of antimatter missiles its way,” Kris said, still working on catching her breath, “but we only have a limited supply of them. Order the Royal to scrounge up some rocks and send them at it fast.”
“I’ve sent the order,” Nelly reported.
“And what do you want to do with that spark of life we see on the station?” Jack asked from his egg parked beside Kris’s.
“Mount up your Marines and see what you find,” Kris said. “If there’s anyone over there alive, I want a word with them. Clearly, they need to understand what a white flag means.”
“Kris, I didn’t notice any white flag,” Jack said. Kris could almost see the grimace on his face. “They set a trap, and we tripped it. It wasn’t a very good trap, and we tripped it with our usual Longknife sledgehammer, but . . .” He left the conclusion to Kris.
“Yeah,” she said with a sigh, “I’ve got to quit expecting these folks to be decent and open to negotiations. Foolish of me to even think so.”
“I’ll mount up both Marine companies,” Jack said. “Captain Drago, can we borrow the Wasp’s pinnace?”
“Take all the longboats, too. Better you see what lies over there than me.”
It would prove regrettable that anyone had to see it.
56
A longboat went in first. It headed not for any particular hatch but for one of the vents that had been seared in the side of the station by a reactor’s hot breath.
They expected a lot of death and destruction; still, what they found was a shock even for battle-hardened Marines.
“Damn, there are bodies all over the place,” Gunny Brown reported to them as soon as he and a squad of Marines were inside.
“Was it explosive decompression when the reactors got dumped?” Kris asked.
“The bodies don’t look like they died of that, ma’am,” Gunny reported. “I got a forensic team right behind me. The sergeant heading it up thinks they were dead before space got to them.”
“Any idea what killed them?”
“There’s a lot of paper cups floating around here. Droplets of liquid. They captured some of it and they’re doing a field analysis. Give us a minute or two, Admiral.”
Kris settled back into her chair in flag plot, tightened her belt, and prepared to wait. The Wasp had gone to Condition Charlie after tossing a few large chunks of rubble over the horizon of the station at the derelict warship.