The Black Ships (33 page)

Mars Orbit

March 13
^th
, 2028

“G
et some kip, Mike. You look absolutely knackered.” Jan had drifted
into the workstation, doubtless at the urging of McCutcheon. “They have enough
staff for three shifts in here; let someone else have a go.” A lieutenant
hovered behind her, waiting to take his seat if she managed to talk him into
leaving the CIC. “Do you want poor Evans here to tell his kid that he came all
the way to Mars to do nothing but listen to music in his bunk?”

Mike had to admit she was right. If she’d
realized he was asleep when she started talking to him, she was keeping it to
herself. “Yeah,” he sighed. “I should get some food first, all those coffee
packs are eating a hole through my stomach.” He undid the straps that held him
to his chair and floated over to where Jan waited. “All warmed up for you.” He
grinned at Evans as he buckled in.

“How is Liam doing?” he asked her as they
drifted over to the main companionway on their way to the mess deck. “I heard he
came out of surgery a couple of hours ago.”

“He’ll be fine,” she said. “They plan to
keep him under for a few more hours since he hasn’t had a lot of rest over the
last thirty-six hours.” She had a cynical grin on her face. “I think McCutcheon
sent me looking for you to get my mind off everything.”

“He’ll probably be safer than you if you’re
going down to the surface,” Mike suggested helpfully. “Once the fighting is
over they’ll still have a lot of prisoners down there; they may try to cause
trouble.”

“Safe and on a ship back to Earth,” she
said with a tired smile at Mike. “With his injuries, there’s a good chance
he’ll be shipped back with the rest of the wounded. I’ll be here studying the
enemy while he’s back in the U.K. recovering.” They reached the exit hatch that
led out of the CIC and into the companionway. “Talk about long-distance
relationships…”

“Do these studies involve probes of any
sort?”

“I’m sorry?”

 Mike shook his head. “Never mind,
just trying to distract you.”

“How long since you ate anything?”

“Not counting those ‘meal bars’?” he asked.
“Nothing since we hit orbit.”

“Call coming in from the
Willsen
.”
The communications officer’s simple announcement raised a cheer in the ship’s
nerve center. The electronic warfare squadron hadn’t been heard from since the
fight began. “Putting it on speaker.”

Mike stopped by the hatch, grabbing Jan by
the arm.

“… chasing the wreck of the
Cú Chulainn
so
we had the planet between us and the fleet until now.” Captain Logan’s
sentence, though picked up in the middle, was nonetheless intelligible. “There
was no stopping her with her systems down but we managed to take off over two
hundred crew with our shuttles and we don’t have a hell of a lot of food to put
in all those extra mouths. Request permission to transfer the survivors to the
Ares
,
over.”

“Logan, you magnificent bastard,” Towers
exclaimed, not caring about protocol. “Send them over, and nicely done. What’s
the status of your command?”

Evans’ head poked down out of the large
opening in the ceiling. He spotted Mike and waved him over. “Someone wants to
talk to you at my station,” he said with a wry grimace. “Just make sure that
you remember; it’s
my
chair now.”

Mike shot up to the work station so fast he
almost struck his head again. There, on the screen, was the reason he had
stayed at his post for so long. “Mickey.” He felt the tension drain from his
body, tension that he hadn’t even noticed until this moment. He suddenly felt
very tired.

“Hi, Mike; good to see you guys came
through in one piece.” She leaned in. “Did Keira recover?”

Keira.
He
suddenly felt guilty. He hadn’t seen her since the last time he and Mickey had
talked. “Doc says she’s fine. I’m going to go see her as soon as I leave the
CIC.”
Then some food, followed by falling asleep on my way to my bunk.
He half-feared he’d be found drifting down some companionway, dead asleep.
“Everyone’s ok over there?”

“Yep. We didn’t have any excitement over
here aside from a high-speed rescue operation, so I was pretty useless after we
sent our signal.” She tried to cover a small, secret smile but Mike had grown
up with her. “Farquhar says ‘hi’ to all the old Hawaii team.”

“So you guys are still on a last name
basis?” Mike teased.

“Go to bed, Mike, you look exhausted.”

Mars Orbit

March 14
^th
, 2028

T
he ride over from the
Ares
was almost complete. The Osprey
was rotating to align with the airlock hatch when Sprunger, the man sitting
across from Märti, began to struggle with his seatbelt. At first Märti was
going to reprimand the man for breaching shuttle procedures but he noticed the
poorly coordinated efforts as the man struggled with the release catch.

The major released his belt, grasping Sgt
Oberlin’s shoulder and pointing at the panicking soldier. They reached him just
as he gave up on the belt and started beating on his helmet. In the
unpressurised hold of the Osprey, the young man would certainly die if he
removed his headgear. The two men managed to pin the soldier’s arms in front of
his body and Oberlin quickly slipped a plastic zip tie around his wrists before
linking three more ties together to secure the man’s feet. Cheap and effective,
the ubiquitous plastic ties were Geneva Convention compliant and all of Märti’s
men carried them.

The Swiss had been warned about the
psychological effects of long duration EVA work. During their training at the
Mars Analogue Compound on Mauna Kea; instructors had advised them that
prolonged confinement inside an EVA suit could lead to feelings of
claustrophobia. The confinement of the suit, along with the difficulties
involved in eating and heeding the call of nature would magnify the stress of
combat. They’d all kept it in mind but after leaving the surface, relieved by a
fresh rotation of troops, dementia had seemed a remote possibility.

Märti took a quick look out the opening
rear hatch before an idea came to him. He tapped the side of Oberlin’s helmet
so the man would look at him. “He’s in no shape to make the hop,” he began,
their visors touching. The
hop
was the short slide along a guide line
connecting a ring bolt on the inner wall of the airlock on the
Hermann
to
a similar ring on the Osprey. It was very much like riding a zip line except
for the lack of gravity and the two-hundred-kilometer fall.

“I’ll go first while you hook him up,” the
major continued. “Then you can shove him over to me.” Märti turned and pulled
the hop line down from the reel above and hooked it to the ring on his suit’s
load-bearing webbing. Behind him the
Hermann
filled the view out the
open hatch as the Osprey rotated. They were in position, ten feet away from
their home ship.

Märti unlatched the tread plate and rotated
it down from the ceiling, locking it into place. He grabbed the small handles
and pulled his feet up to rest against the plate, crouching in a position that
was now offset by ninety degrees from the floor. Looking up from the floor of
the hold, he took aim at a handle next to the airlock door of the
Hermann
and
pushed off lightly, trailing the hop line behind him as he went.

He reached the handle and held it with his
left hand while activating the outer door with his right. It silently slid open
and he pulled himself in, attaching one of the ship’s hanging carabiner hooks
to his webbing before unhooking the hop line and securing it to the ring at the
back of the airlock. He appeared in the door, waving at Oberlin who shoved the
still-struggling soldier across. Märti pulled him in the door and hooked him up
to one of the hanging straps.

The rest of the men crossed over without
incident and they unhooked the hop line before closing the door to pressurize
the airlock. As soon as it was safe to do so, Oberlin removed the man’s helmet
but left the man’s hands and feet bound for the moment. The big sergeant let
the helmet drift and tried to pull him closer so they could talk quietly but
the man was having none of it. His bound hands darted up to grab the helmet and
he frantically searched inside, turning it from side to side before finally
relaxing and shoving the offending headgear away.

“It’s in there,” he said with evident
relief. “
Gopfertami
spider!”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then
everyone roared with laughter. “You
schwöschter
,” laughed one of his
squad mates. “We thought you’d lost your marbles.”

“
Verpiss de, du gorilla blau arsch
!”
he retorted. “That little
dubbel
was trying to crawl up my nose.”
Insects still thrived on the ships of the fleet, most of them tracing their
lineage back to ancestors who had hitched a ride on the loads of produce that
had been shipped up before departure.

The laughing and teasing continued as the
inner door opened and they made their way back to their original dormitory
where they enthusiastically greeted their wounded comrades. Märti was fiercely
proud of these men. They had been through a demoralizing mission in France
where their sympathies had always been with the protestors. They had endured
months of cramped quarters in low gravity, a boarding action, and a grueling
two-day fight on the planet’s surface with little respite from their confining
EVA suits.

The enemy had proven to be willing but
poorly trained. The vast majority of alien troops had still been garrisoned at
their main complex, the target of Operation
Candy Store
. Had they
arrived only a week later, the fight to clear the ships in orbit would have
been much harder as the troops would have been shifted aboard for their journey
to Earth. As it was, they fell with great bravery but little coordination at
their main complex. At the mine, the final fight had taken out almost twenty of
Märti’s men but they had rallied quickly from their surprise and the combined
Swiss-American force had cut down the last gasp of resistance.

The tale of Leuzinger’s mad gamble was
making the rounds as men competed to be the first to tell wounded friends about
the battle with the tanks.

Only eight enemy mining specialists had
been captured inside the dark tunnels. They were all that the sophisticated
excavation systems required and they were reluctantly cooperating with the
human engineers who now worked to understand what had been installed during
their absence. Mining was about to undergo a revolution and the men of Märti’s
battalion had helped to make it a reality.

Those men were tired, they were hungry and
they were forming a huge line already to use the head. Märti considered
exercising the privilege of rank but quickly dismissed it. He had always
disapproved of such liberties and so he drifted past them to find one of the
heads near the forward battery. The men greeted him as he floated past. Some
nodded solemnly, perhaps assuming it the only correct way to acknowledge him
while others called out with a wave and a cheerful grin, asking when the
Hermann
would leave for Earth.

All of them were elated at having defeated
an enemy who possessed the technology to travel between the stars. Their
weapons had proven to be advanced, reliable and largely unimaginative. The
enemy assault rifles were of one design. They had a decent rate of fire as well
as excellent range and optics, but they had none of the accessories found on
the human weapons.  The simple, shotgun-type rounds that the marines had
used to such effect in gutting the final enemy attack seemed beyond the grasp
of the aliens or, perhaps, beneath their notice.

I suppose we’ve had far more practice at
killing humans than they have,
thought Märti as he
moved through the dormitory.
We’ve come up with so many exciting ways to
kill our fellow man over the last few centuries.
 

The word throughout the fleet, or what remained
of it, was that the enemy may have had impressive technology but they had very
little experience in actual, high-intensity combat. Nonetheless, Märti’s men
had traveled to another planet, fought an alien aggressor and shed their own
blood to win an important victory. 
And all I can think about is my
bladder,
he thought with amusement.

Märti soon found he was grinning like an
idiot and he didn’t care because the men loved it; they knew he was proud of
them. The men of one squad were hovering in a rough circle as he drifted past,
small crumbs floating around them as they chewed. “
Bretzeli
, Major?” a
young private holding a battered tin offered eagerly.

In truth, Märti’s bladder was demanding
relief far more loudly than his stomach but he knew it would please these men
to share a simple treat with their battalion commander. He nodded as he joined
the circle and opened his mouth. The young man grinned and took careful aim,
ignoring the good-natured jeers of his comrades as he sent the traditional
Swiss biscuit spinning towards the major’s open mouth.

Märti grabbed the arm of the nearest
soldier, pushing against the man’s mass to position himself in the path of the
small confection and trapped it between his teeth. The small group cheered at
the idiotic display as he took a bite. The simple biscuit tasted far better
than he would have expected and he found himself thinking of home with a sudden
longing. “Where did you get these?”

“My
tante
made them for me before we
left,” the man said proudly. “She showed up at the airport before we went up to
the
Hermann.”

Oddly, Märti remembered the moment. “That’s
right,” he said in surprise, remembering the heartwarming scene from what
seemed ages ago. “You came up on the same Osprey with me. A pretty woman with
long black hair gave you the tin and made you promise to come home in one
piece.” He grinned. “I thought that was your sister!”

The young soldier grinned widely. He was
surprised that his CO remembered the exchange. All the men in the small group
were pleased to see that their leader took an interest in their lives or, at
least, in their attractive relatives. “She’s only a few years older than me,”
the soldier explained. “She lives in Chur so she came to see me off.”

“Perhaps she can pick you up when we get
back; I’m giving everyone two weeks leave when we get home, so you can consider
yourselves dismissed the minute our feet hit the ground.” The men cheered as
Märti waved the remnant of his bretzeli. “
Merci vilmal
,” he mumbled as
he stuffed it in his mouth. “I’m going to find a head that doesn’t have a huge
line before it’s too late.”

He continued forward and entered the port
side companionway. It ran between the outer gun mechanisms and the central core
where the surgery, mess deck and magazines were located. In the distance, he
saw a foot drift into view from a side corridor. It slowly rotated out of view
and he thought little of it as he approached until the man’s head rotated out
several inches into the companionway.

His eyes were glassy and a small undulating
mass of blood clung to an ugly gash in his neck. As Märti watched in shock, a
small globule of the fresh red liquid separated from the mass at his neck and,
freed from the rotational constraints of the dead German marine, drifted out to
spatter against the major’s knee. The physical impact had the same effect as a
slap to the face and Märti pushed forward to grasp the man, checking his pulse
and finding none.

He looked down the short hallway. He had
been here before, Magazine P-4. There was blood on the door controls. Someone
had killed the sentry; they were inside with the ordinance.

His own weapons had been handed in as he
came aboard; loaded firearms on a pressurized ship were about as popular as an
insurance salesman at a cocktail party. He took the sentry’s sidearm, cocked it
and reached over to take the sentry’s headset.

He saw Sgt. Dreher floating down the
companionway and waved him over as he activated the headset. “Security, this is
Major Bohren. Someone has killed the sentry on Magazine P-4 and I believe he’s
in there with the warheads right now.” The sergeant took a look at the dead
German. Realizing that he was a sentry, he shot a look at the magazine door and
frowned in alarm. “Sgt. Dreher and I are going in now. We don’t have time to
wait for backup.” He pulled the earpiece away from his mouth as the security
officer confirmed the dispatch of an armed team. “Nukes,” he said simply,
nodding at the bloody door.

The two men approached the door and Märti
punched the door release. It slid open to reveal the rack on the far side of
the wall. He poked his head around the corner and saw one of Stager’s men
floating near the end of the small storage room. One of the W87 warheads
floated next to him, slowly rotating. In the man’s hand was a remote detonation
controller. He was out of his suit so he didn’t have a name tag for Märti to
rely on.

He had long since given up on trying to
remember every name in the battalion. Even knowing every man in his unit when
he was a company commander was hard enough. He suddenly wished he had kept
trying.

Dreher came to the rescue. “
Hoi,
Richner,” he greeted the man cheerfully, casually pretending there wasn’t a
dead German floating in the hall or a remote detonator in Richner’s hand. “They
have wine in the dorm if you want some.” He scratched irritably at an armpit.
“Always get itchy when I miss my shower,” he grumbled.

“You stay back,” Richner shouted. “We
weren’t supposed to win,” he said with firm conviction. “They were God’s
punishment and we defied it. We have to pay.”

Märti was shocked at the statement, one
that he had heard several times from the men as they joked. This man obviously
took it far more seriously. The major had once wondered if he was meant to stop
Humanity from defeating the enemy. He had come to believe that his true role
was in helping mankind to capture the secrets of the aliens. It was a
realization inspired by his musings on the Vikings and the ancient natives of
North America; this time the technology of their enemy would be used to change
their future.