Starship Tomahawk (The Hive Invasion Book 2) (4 page)

He stood over her, and for a moment she thought he would apologize. His face was hard and emotionless, though. "If you're not with us, you're against us."

She scrambled to her feet, frightened and furious. "This is wrong! They're pacifists."

"We're at war. Pacifists serve the enemy." He turned away, leaving her staring open-mouth at his back.

Sirens wailed in the distance, but she doubted anyone else heard. The redshirts were stepping back from the scene of the beating, re-forming in a triple rank. She watched as one of her bots, guided by a simple AI, drifted along just above the column. She would have a record of every face. Justice would be done, though it would be cold comfort to the victims.

The officer with the black sash made a gesture with his arm and the column resumed marching. Janice stared after them, wishing she could find a brick to throw at their retreating backs, wishing she had the courage to throw the brick if she had one. Then she turned her attention to the peace protesters.

Blood speckled the sidewalk and the street. Not a single protester was standing. Some lay curled in a fetal position. Others sat huddled, arms curled protectively around their heads. The plump man who had tried to protect a woman lay sprawled on his back, arms wide. She knelt beside him.

He still breathed, and she murmured, "Thank God." His face was a bloody mess, one eye swollen shut. Blood bubbled from his mouth every time he exhaled. She slid a hand under his neck, checking for spinal damage, then turned his head to the side to let blood drain more easily from his mouth.

Emergency vehicles began to touch down all around her. A uniformed paramedic knelt across from her. "It's all right, ma'am. I've got it from here."

Janice stood and backed away. She wanted to scream or burst into tears, or just sink down on her haunches, close her eyes, and push the whole awful scene out of her mind.

Instead, she checked the bots. All three of them were doing a good job of collecting background shots, following motion or pointing their cameras at anything shaped like a human being. She left them to their work and called Pan Galactic.

"J-Doll," drawled a bored voice in her ear. "Whatcha got for me?"

"Calvin. It's-" she spent an awful moment looking for a combination of words that wouldn't reduce her to tears. Finally she said, "Check my cameras."

"One sec." When he spoke again the boredom was gone from his voice. "What the hell happened?"

She told him, retreating into professional detachment like she was putting on armor. "Run it now," she said. "I'll get ready for a live recap."

"Right. Stand by."

She took several deep breaths, steadying herself, and thought about what she would say. She turned her back to the carnage and got a bot positioned ahead of her, just above eye line, so the paramedics and injured victims would be visible behind her. She was superficially calm, but she knew some raw emotion would show through.

That was just fine with her. The situation was awful and outrageous, and she wouldn't pretend otherwise.
Bloody gang of bullies. Beating on pacifists? It must have seemed pretty safe. But you made a mistake. You're going to pay. I'm going to see to it.

A long minute crawled past, and then another. She glanced over her shoulder and saw paramedics lifting a stretcher into an ambulance. A couple of protesters climbed in as well, one woman holding a bandage to her face. Janice frowned. She was losing her dramatic backdrop.

"Calvin? I'm ready."

Silence.

"Calvin? We need to strike while the iron is hot."

Calvin said, "Um …"

"What you mean, um?"

There was a long pause, and then Calvin spoke, every word pained and reluctant. "Janice? We're not going to run the story."

"What?"

"Criticizing the EDF isn't exactly the most … prudent thing we can do right now."

"What the hell? They just beat the crap out of a bunch of hippies with candles! We can't NOT report this!"

When Calvin spoke again he sounded embarrassed. "We have a lot of staff at the head office. I've got their well-being to think of. And my own. And yours."

Something squirmed in her guts, a worm of fear that told her things were much, much worse than she'd ever imagined. She remembered the sound of boots hitting flesh. The goons had ignored her this time. Next time, they might not.
Maybe I should listen to him. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

"No bloody way, Calvin. We have to run this story. We have to."

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Then Calvin said, "Sorry."

She cut the connection, spent a moment glaring at the bot in front of her, then told it to record. "This is Janice Ling, freelance journalist. I'm just down the hill from Moot Point, at the scene of a vicious attack on a group of innocent peace protesters …"

Hammett held his breath as a wormhole opened and his tiny fleet dropped into normal space. He didn't exhale until Kaur said, "We seem to be alone."

They were on the edge of the Naxos star system, four light hours from the star. Ariadne, the planet containing the colony, was much too distant to see in any detail. With any luck it meant the three corvettes could also not be seen.

Hammett kept his back straight and his face expressionless, but he wanted to sag in relief. He had imagined popping out into the middle of an enemy fleet, with twenty long minutes before he could jump out again. Now he found himself strangely with nothing to do. He had given his orders before the last jump. The ship was focusing its scanners even now on the distant colony. There was nothing for Hammett to do but wait.

"There's something in orbit," said Sanjari. She tapped an icon, and a blurry image appeared on Hammett's screen. The planet was nothing more than a fuzzy blob. The object in orbit was a speck on the near side of the planet, ringed in white to keep it from being lost in the image of the planet.

The urge to ask foolish questions was strong, and Hammett suppressed it with difficulty. There was no point in asking if Sanjari could see anything else. It wasn't as if she would keep the information to herself.

Ramirez twisted around in his seat, an odd expression on his face. "Captain."

"What is it?"

Ramirez touched a finger to his ear. I'm picking up a … radio broadcast."

"And?"

Ramirez shook his head, as if an explanation was beyond him. His fingers moved, and music, faint and scratchy, came from the bridge speakers. It was something classical, a full orchestra by the sound of it, a lot of strings with woodwinds rising in the background.

Hammett raised an eyebrow.

"The broadcast is coming from the planet, Sir." Ramirez looked flustered, as if he'd said something foolish. "It's very faint. I don't know what-"

The music faded and a woman began to speak. "That was Wheaton's second Symphony, performed by the Mars Symphony Orchestra. You're listening to Radio Free Naxos, the voice of stubborn humanity in the colony that just wouldn't die. It's a long dark night, but the sun will rise again, and in the meantime you're not alone. Now I'm going to play a classic of a different sort. This is Mathew West with Coal Mining Blues."

More music began, and Ramirez gestured in the air, reducing the volume. Hammett looked around at his bridge crew.

Kaur said, "Apparently there are survivors."

Sanjari said, "With a radio station?"

Kaur shrugged. "It seems so."

"Monitor the broadcast," Hammett said to Ramirez. "Record it too, but I want you to listen. One EMP hit and the recording's gone." He leaned back in the captain's chair, thinking. Survivors were a complication. He was ashamed by the thought, but the simple fact was, his already difficult mission was made vastly more complicated by humans on Ariadne. If the Hive had wiped them out, Hammett's life would have been easier.

"Obviously we need to take a closer look," he said. "In the meantime, let's recap what we know about Ariadne and the colony. Ms. Kaur?"

Kaur nodded and tapped a console. A map of the planet appeared in the air above her console. "Naxos," she said. "The third system ever reached by human explorers, and the second system connected to Earth by Gates. Gate One goes from Earth to Alpha Centauri, and Gate Two takes you back to Earth. Gate Three connects Earth to Naxos." She frowned. "Connected." The Gate was offline now.

"Naxos had two Gates," she continued. "Gate Four led back to Earth. Gate Five continued on to Deirdre. From there it linked to four more systems, so quite a lot of traffic went through Naxos before the Hive showed up."

Hammett nodded, fighting impatience. It would do no harm for Kaur to take them through the basics.

"There has been a human presence on Ariadne for a hundred and nine years," Kaur said. "Terraforming began in earnest about eighty years ago. Ariadne is well within the Goldilocks zone, and it has a gravity of about point nine eight, so it was an excellent candidate for colonization." She moved her fingers in the air and the holo projection zoomed in on the northern hemisphere.

"The planet has an atmosphere mostly composed of hydrogen and helium. Terraforming efforts have focused on generating oxygen at low elevations, where it can dislodge the lighter local gases." She zoomed in further. "This is the Green Crater. The floor of the crater is almost eight kilometers lower than most of the planet, with quite steep walls." The projection showed a circular gash in the planet's crust, the bottom darkened by a combination of vegetation and shadow.

"The crater is just over five hundred kilometers wide. The earliest settlers built walls in key places to minimize wind, then set to work making air. They used-"

"Let's skip the details on air generation," Hammett interrupted. "The bottom of the crater is full of air. Let's move on."

Kaur frowned, then nodded. She had an engineering background, Hammett remembered from his personnel file. She would be fascinated by the technical details.

"It's been about fifty years since the crater floor has been able to support plant life beyond genetically modified grasses and shrubs. The air quality has been stable enough to allow people to live there without artificial air supplies for just over thirty years. The original settlement has grown substantially in that time." Kaur's hands moved and the projection of the crater disappeared, replaced by a flat image of a small city. The picture changed every few seconds, showing different views of the settlement. "Spacecom's best estimate is that the Naxos system contained eighteen thousand, five hundred and twelve people at the time of the invasion. Nearly everyone lived in Harlequin. It's the only city in the system."

Hammett watched pictures appear and vanish in the projected display. The city seemed to have no buildings taller than two stories. The sky was never visible. Instead, he saw the looming wall of the crater in the background, a cliff of ochre stone. Most of the buildings were made of stone blocks the same color as the crater walls. It gave the place a rustic, friendly feel that was missing in most Earthly cities.

Pumpkin-colored stone dominated the city, but lush green vegetation offered strong competition. Harlequin had the look of a town carved from the jungle. Trees flourished everywhere, mostly palms with a variety of fruit trees mixed in. Every building had a lawn in front, and planters lined sidewalks or marked property lines. Flowers erupted from the planters, while vines climbed walls and spread across tiled roofs.

Some of the pictures showed the outskirts of the little city stretching away in the background. The floor of the crater looked like jungle at first glance. Hammett saw broadleaf trees twice or even three times the height of the tallest buildings in Harlequin.

A closer look revealed that much of the crater was under cultivation. Wide swathes of greenery had telltale lines showing that they were crops, not wild growth. The picture changed, and he saw a house and outbuildings nestled in what appeared to be a forest, until he noted the trees stood in perfectly straight lines. It was an orchard.

Kaur continued her lecture. "One thousand and fourteen people would have been off-planet in nine different settlements and stations orbiting either the planet or the star. In addition, there was a science outpost on Dryad with a staff of several hundred." The picture changed to a series of domes set on a crater-pocked plain. The sun was a fiery giant that dominated the sky.

"Our intelligence is now 42 days old," Kaur said. "That's how long it's been since Gate Three went offline."

"What about this radio station?" Hammett asked. "Do we have any record of it?" He had heard of public radio broadcasts. They were a phenomenon of the distant past. Still, colonies often employed primitive technology side by side with cutting-edge modern tech. He'd seen waterwheels and saddle horses on some worlds. Why not a radio station?

"I can't find anything specific about it," said Kaur.

"All right. We'll track it down." He looked at Sanjari. "Anything interesting on the long-range scans?"

"That orbiting object is about to move past the visible disc of the planet," she said. "That will make it a lot easier to pick out details."

"Show me," he said.

A projection appeared above her console, showing the mystery object in its white circle almost at the edge of the planet. Resolution was already much better than before, Hammett noted. The ship's AI would have been fine-tuning the focus and finding ways to enhance the image.

Sanjari zoomed in until the edge of the planet was a vertical black wall and the orbiting object was a palm-sized blob. The blob moved past the wall, and details began to appear. The object became a crisp silhouette.

"It doesn't match any ships or stations that should be in the system," Sanjari said.

Hammett didn't need the clarification. He knew what he was seeing. It was an amalgamated vessel, a collection of Hive ships.

Kaur said, "Well, that's disappointing, but hardly surprising."

Hammett nodded. "We need to figure out its period of rotation. We'll jump to the far side of Ariadne from the colony. We need to keep the planet between us and that ship."

"Calculating," said Benson.

"The
Bayonet
will stay here and deploy the Gate," Hammett said. "
Tomahawk
and
Achilles
will jump in."

He saw Kaur and Touhami exchange glances, though neither of them spoke. The
Bayonet
carried a replacement Gate ready to connect to Earth. It would allow instant transport between the two systems. Deploying the Gate would bring them reinforcements, but it would involve risk, as well. Powering up the gate would require a fantastic amount of energy. The gate would glow like a beacon as it formed a connection to the matching Gate in the Sol system, twelve long light-years away. In the vastness of space it might go unnoticed by the Hive. Or it might draw in every Hive ship in the system.

And the Gate would have to blaze away for more than three hours before it could make a connection.

"We can jump in twenty-six minutes," Bennett announced.

Hammett nodded and steepled his fingers, doing his best to appear calm. The next jump would take them very close to the planet. In all likelihood they would be spotted immediately, no matter what precautions they took. Even if they arrived undetected, they couldn't stay hidden for long.

In a very short time – probably just over twenty-six minutes – they would be fighting for their lives.