It hadn’t reacted to any of them.
The Royal was headed this way with a couple of good-size rocks and ice hunks from the giant’s ring. Next orbit, they’d see if there was any fight left in the wreck.
Show it or smash it.
Kris no longer cared which.
She was starting to develop a very negative attitude toward her enemy.
“We got the results from those droplets and the cups. There was some kind of alcoholic drink in them. Alcohol and cyanide, we think.”
Kris turned to where Amanda and Jacques sat at her conference table. Amanda was rapidly going pale. Beside her, Penny’s mouth was falling open.
It was Jacques, the anthropologist, who gave voice to what the others were struggling to get their minds around. “They poisoned themselves on their communion wine,” he said.
On the huge base ship they’d shot up, they’d discovered a memorial garden where the ashes of the dead were scattered. There they grew a grain and a fruit that seemed readily converted to alcohol. Bread and Wine.
Sacraments, they’d concluded at the time.
Now, with their chances to continue the fight slim and the option of surrender seemingly the only one any rational person would consider, the enemy had taken their own lives with their sacrament.
“Again, the aliens have chosen death before surrender,” Kris muttered to herself. Or maybe she spoke aloud.
“But to make mass suicide a religious experience. Dear God,” was, no doubt, truly intended as a prayer from Penny.
“My general tells me to tell you that we had a nation very much like that among us not all that long ago,” Zarra said from the corner where the feline observers sat.
“What became of them?” Kris asked.
“They learned different. That life is more important than a hollow death,” Zarra answered without consulting her officers. Then she had to turn and tell them what she’d said.
“They agree with what I said,” she quickly added.
“We have had groups like that also,” Jacques said. “They have also learned differently. These aliens we fight are slow learners.”
“The general says maybe they are not meant to learn. Only to die.”
“I wouldn’t mind that so much,” Kris said, and was surprised by the words as they came out of her mouth, “but they take a lot of good Sailors and Marines with them.”
“My admiral says that is always sad.”
“Yes,” Kris agreed, dryly.
“What are we going to do?” Penny asked.
“Find out who’s still alive in the aft section,” Kris said, and tapped her commlink. “Jack, have you been following this?”
“Loud and painfully clear,” he reported.
“You about to go in?”
“The pinnace is clamped onto the hull a good hundred meters short of the end. We’re about to cut our way into it.”
“Jack, be careful,” Kris said.
“Wife, I always am.”
Kris took a deep breath and gave the order. “Marines, land the landing force.”
57
General Juan Montoya did one final check of his lead platoon. All were as ready as they ever would be.
The battle-armored space suits were primed and ready. Their weapons were locked and loaded.
Jack signaled the Sailor, herself in an unarmored space suit, and the hull of the pinnace opened up a hole in it the size of a double door, which sealed to the aliens’ hull. A Marine applied a laser torch to the revealed metal. In less than a minute, a huge chunk of plate drifted off where it was pushed.
Another Marine combat engineer put tape on the sharp edges of the cut. The battle suits were tough, but there was no reason to ding them unnecessarily.
Jack motioned, and a sergeant led the first fire team through the hole. As the last trooper of that four shot aboard the station, a second team followed.
Jack had promised Kris that he would not lead from the front. With eight Marines of his battalion aboard the station, he figured he would no longer be in the front, and slipped himself into line as the third fire team of the squad went in.
It was strange how a man trained to be a Secret Service Agent changed his idea of a man’s job when he spent all his time with combat Marines.
Well, them and a certain Longknife.
Jack forced his head back into the game and faced what he knew would be waiting for him.
Gunny’s warning was hardly enough for what he faced.
Bodies drifted, thick as seaweed on a kelp bed he’d swum in as a kid. There were men and women, elders, kids, and infants.
So many of the bodies were tiny.
Most stared at him with eyes frozen in some hard stare that the poison had brought. A few of the kids almost seemed asleep.
Jack wanted to puke.
Instead, he did his best to ignore what he saw and ordered a follow-up fire team to sling weapons and shove bodies forward.
What they were after was aft.
“Up here, sir. I think I’ve found what we’re looking for.”
Jack found a purchase and shoved himself off for the aftward bulkhead. It stretched far around, showing clearly that the station’s outer wall had been the floor when it spun. The bulkhead went high up for these people, a good fifteen meters.
Possibly they would have put in an extra deck as their population regrew. Apparently, they’d built large, expecting a lot of kids.
From the proportion of the dead, they’d had a population boom in the year since Kris had clobbered them.
Again, Jack had to force his mind to focus on what he had been sent here for.
Ahead of him was a hatch. A hatch with a wheel lock and a window that let you look in.
Jack peered in, shining a light to help him see all there was to see. It wasn’t much. Some two meters away was another hatch with a lock and window.
“Kris, I’ve found an air lock. I think they intended to keep this place airtight. It looks like hurried work.”
“Does that sound as much like a trap to you as it does to me?” came in the form of a question, but Jack doubted that Kris as an admiral or as a Longknife intended it to be taken as such. Certainly not Kris as a wife.
“I’m ordering up the air lock we brought along,” he said.
Did he hear a whispered “thank you,” in response?
Four Sailors came up, their suits equipped with jet packs. Each handled the corner of a large room equipped with airtight hatches. A combat-engineering type had been taking soundings of the bulkhead. He signaled the Sailors, and they adjusted their drift.
The temporary air lock settled into place, and the Marine with the welder quickly locked it down against the wall. As he did that, the Sailors expanded out the lock, tripling its size.
Two squads began filing into the lock. Jack included himself.
Only when the aft lock was sealed down did one of the sailors open up the Smart MetalTM of the forward bulkhead and turn aside for a Marine to put a long, thin bead of explosives along the station bulkhead. He covered it with armored cloth.
“Get ready to shout folks. I’m using the smallest explosion I think I can use, and the cloth should direct the force inward, but if your ears are precious to you, shout on three.”
The count was quick. All had taken themselves off net as Jack had. With the armored space suits, the overpressure was merely annoying, although Jack distinctly felt kicked where he preferred Kris to fondle.
The wall blew in, and the first rank of Marines rolled through the newly created hole.
Jack was in the second rank.
He joined the rest of his Marines, standing there, dumbfounded.
“Are you getting this?” he said, then remembered he’d killed his sound and video feed before the explosion.
“Kris, are you getting this?” he repeated after clicking himself back onto the net.