The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (27 page)

For there was merit in a clean death.

Chapter Fifteen
Disaster

Tarwa Chu weighed three hundred kilograms.

Or close enough. Under six G-s of boost, it felt like the overhead bulkhead had snapped loose and fallen on top of her. The blaring, roaring, bone-rattling roar of the fusion engines and the violent aero-buffeting shook the ship hard enough to convince Tarwa that the old tub was about to fly apart. The noise and vibration were literally stunning. Tarwa was having the greatest trouble keeping her mind focused. She was very glad the ship could fly its own orbital boost pattern. Maybe there were pilots who could fly a Warlord-class cruiser to orbit on manual, but they weren’t aboard the
Duncan.

But she was gladder still to be leaving Daltgeld behind. That planet was bad news.

Tarwa watched her instruments as best she could through the haze of tunnel vision and the other effects of massive acceleration. The graphic flight path indicator showed the
Duncan
sailing right up the middle of her assigned path. All was well.

Better still, it was almost over. Subjective time seemed to move very slowly under this much thrust. Tarwa watched the boost-duration clock. Ten seconds left in the burn. She closed her eyes on the premise of a watched pot never boiling. She didn’t get nervous until she had counted to ten twice. Her time sense
couldn’t
be that distorted. The engines must have locked open somehow. Something was wrong! The ship was out of control. Heart racing, she opened her eyes and saw the counter just reaching zero.

The engines shut down and left Tarwa and the rest of the ship in a freefall. A brief burn half an orbit from now to circularize their orbit and that would be that. Tarwa breathed a sigh of relief. Back in orbit. Now they were safe. She unclipped her belt and allowed herself to float a few centimeters clear of the command chair. It felt good not to have any pressure on her back anymore.

Around her, the bridge crew began its post-boost checkouts. She could feel the same mood from all of them. All were glad to be away from that damned rathole.

She still had a ship half-taken apart for maintenance, but that would seem a very minor headache up against an invisible enemy like the parasites—

A giant’s hand slapped her back down into the commander chair. The engines had relit! About two G-s this time. What the hell was—

She strapped herself back in and slapped an intercom button. “Wellingham! Who the hell lit the main engines and why?”

“The sodding parasites, that’s who,” Wellingham replied bitterly. “At least I assume it was them. None of my personnel did it.”

Tarwa felt like she had been struck down again by something far more deadly than a giant’s hand. “Parasites? I thought you had them capt—”

“I did. At least four of the ones riding the hull got aboard when the captain’s gig was launched. Happened just as we were about to boost.”

“Damn it! Can’t you track and capture them the way you caught the first one?”

“I can track the beasties, all right—but remember, they can order blast doors shut—and air pumps to run. Damage control reported a series of door and pump failures to me about 90 seconds ago. Highly selective failures. It looks to me as if the parasites sealed themselves in the aft section of the ship and then opened the emergency air spill valves. They’ve put themselves in vacuum.”

Wellingham was silent for a moment. “There aren’t any pressure suit lockers in that section. The vacuum will have killed everyone in that section of the ship by now. Besides which, the vacuum effectively puts several tons of air pressure sealing against the blast doors. We’ll have to cut our way in. It’ll take us a long time—even if the parasites don’t interfere by cutting
our
air. Which they could do at any time.”

“All right, presumably the parasites are somewhere in the aft part of the ship. Can you tell precisely where they are?” Tarwa asked. There were several points in the ship circuitry that would accept engine commands. Some of them could be cut out of the command loop or shunted out—

“They’re in main ship control,” Wellingham said quietly.

—But that wasn’t one of the shuntable points. Tarwa noted bitterly that the second wave of parasites had known exactly where to go—as if the first one to get loose in the machinery had served as a scout.

“What are you doing to cut them out of the circuit?” she asked.

“Thinking, ma’am. We can’t just go cutting in there. The parasites control the ship aft of bulkhead 105, which means they have all the engineering spaces, propulsion, and the jump gear. For the moment, we control life-support and not much else. And we must assume that the parasites can shut down the entire ship’s environmental system whenever they want to.

“I’d recommend getting all hands into pressure suits at once. And then—ah, stand by.” There was a pause on the audio link for a moment.

“Holy God in the stars!” Wellingham said. His voice had been calm up to then, but now Tarwa heard fear in his tone. “Two new developments. The ensign on the tracking scope reports that the four parasites seemed to have ah,
merged
into each other. And they’ve powered up the jump gear.”

Wellingham paused again to regain his composure. “I think they want to take this ship—and themselves—to other worlds. One system isn’t enough. They want to get themselves out into the Pact.”

***

Captain’s gig
Malcolm
reached orbit without incident, which pleased Ensign Shoemaker no end. The job was over, save for the trivial job of docking with the
Duncan.

Actually, he admitted, the link-up just might require a little skill. The ensign had qualified in orbital operations, but he’d never actually flown anything but training missions—and not many of those, or all that recently. There was a lot he didn’t really know, things that only came with experience.

Like most neophytes, he followed standard Navy doctrine right down the middle, everything by the book—even the parts of the book that weren’t particularly worthwhile under the circumstances. He had boosted the gig into a five-hundred-kilometer circular parking orbit, where he would perform post-burn checks and make sure his craft was in order before proceeding to the next maneuver. It was a safe assumption that the cruiser had done the same, but she had started her boost earlier, and accelerated a bit harder than the
Malcolm.

Shoemaker thought for a minute. Given the
Malcolm’s
known launch profile and a best-guess at what the
Duncan
could and would do, then the big ship ought to be in the same orbit, but roughly a half-revolution ahead of the gig.
That
in turn meant the cruiser was out of line of sight, with the bulk of the planet between the two craft, and it was going to stay that way. Damn.

He wouldn’t be able to raise the cruiser on radio or laser. He could boost into a higher, slower orbit and wait for the cruiser to come into view around the far side of the planet. But that would waste fuel—and suppose the cruiser shifted to a final orbit he couldn’t reach?

How the hell was he supposed to dock with a target his instruments couldn’t even
see?

But wait a second. The three destroyers were following another Navy doctrine, maintaining planetary synchronous orbits 120 degrees apart from each other. They could serve as relay satellites. Shoemaker checked the navigation computer and saw that the
Banquo
was in position to bounce a signal from the gig to the
Duncan.
Once in communications with the big ship, he could get a solid fix on the cruiser and work up an efficient orbital rendezvous profile. It would work. He felt proud of himself for working through the problem that well.

Captain Spencer popped out of the head, having tended to his many cuts and abrasions and dressed in a pair of repair coveralls.

“Don’t just sit there, Shoemaker,” he said. “Patch through to the
Duncan,”
he ordered. “You should be able to bounce off the
Banquo.
Get to it.”

Shoemaker shrunk in on himself. He didn’t know whether to be angry at the captain for bursting his balloon that casually—or embarrassed that a man fresh out of combat in the nude, bloodied by a half-dozen minor injuries, was able to figure it out before he did, and do so while dressing his wounds.

“Aye, aye, Sir,” he said miserably.

###

Not everyone in the sealed-off section was dead. The parasites were more sophisticated than that. They could plan ahead for future need. And the parasites were going to need a body.

One interior compartment, a maintenance room with a single occupant, was left pressurized though all the surrounding compartments were in vacuum. Petty Officer Karolyn Rozycki, trapped inside, pounded on the hatch and shouted at the top of her lungs, but no one outside was alive to hear her.

The merged parasites, now comprising a single unit about the size of a child’s palm, completed its/their reprogramming of the ship’s navigation system.

It/they left a droplet of itself behind on the circuitry to maintain the heading and prevent the humans from fighting back, and eased its way down out of the circuitry and toward its/their captive. It/they paused for a moment en route to absorb a bit of mass, careful to select an object that it/they would not need later. It/they made its way into the
auxiliary vehicles’ bay and wrapped itself around the foot of
one of the landers. It/they eased up just a trifle on gravity-wave control, unmasking a bit of its/their true gravity well.

The lander, built to handle landings on four-G worlds,
melted, flowed, in toward the parasite. Sparks flashed, fuel
vented
—
but then the lander was gone, and the parasite was imperceptibly larger. Eventually the parasite would absorb the entire ship, which would provide it/they with most of the mass to evolve into a parent creature itself, capable of sending out its own children, free of its own parent’s control.

But that was for the future.

With the added mass of the lander, the merged parasite had the strength to dominate a mind. Not until a merged
parasite controlled a mind could it/they merge into one completely joined and independent creature, a single new
identity. It/they left the aux vehicle deck and came for Rozycki, sliding across the bulkheads and airlocking its
way through pressure doors. It sealed one last set of doors
and pumped air back into the compartment adjacent to Rozycki’s.

The last door slid open even as Rozycki was still pounding on it. She stepped back in surprise when there was no one on the other side. By the time she felt the blob slithering up her leg and looked down to see the silver-bright horror crawling up her body, it was too late. Her screams started again and then cut off—
to be replaced by low, cooing sounds of joy and delight.
The parasite had traced her nervous system, found her pleasure centers, and begun her training. Rozycki col
lapsed to the floor, drunk with blissful, artificial, happiness.

###

On the third try, Wellingham found a working monitor circuit. Thank God for backups. He snapped through various cameras from the sealed-off section, his heart growing sick as he watched.

Old friends, men and woman he had worked with for generations, dead in the killing vacuum, sprawled against the deck plate or inert in their crash couches. One after another, a half-second for each view, the screen displayed the same grim news from every section of the lower engineering bay. Wellingham was about to give up, convinced there was no hope or help to be found—when one of the cameras showed a corpse
moving,
writhing on the floor. The scan program had shifted through half a dozen more cameras before he could react and run the view back to where there had been signs of life.

There. There she was. One of the younger petty officers, Rozycki, flat on her back,
grinning.
He threw in the audio circuit and heard her low moans of pleasure. The hackles rose on the back of his neck. There was something wrong here, something obscene. Something had—

Then he spotted the glint of silvery metal, the small gleaming disk that was wrapped around her forehead. In a leap of intuition rare for the chief, he knew. He understood.

And he wished mightily that he could have thrown a switch and vented Rozycki’s air as well. Better fast death than what that monster would do to her.

But all the systems were locked down. Even that action was denied to him.

###

“We have the relay, Captain,” Shoemaker announced. “You can take it here.”

Spencer shoved Shoemaker out of the pilot’s chair, neglecting the “nice work” or “very good, mister” Shoemaker had been hoping for. It was beginning to dawn on the ensign that the captain had a lot on his mind.

“This is Spencer calling
Duncan.
Come in please,
Duncan.”

“This is Chu commanding
Duncan.
Glad to hear from you, Captain. Please report your status.”

Spencer turned toward Shoemaker. “Is this a secure laser commlink?” he asked. Shoemaker nodded.

“Good thinking,” Spencer said absently, completely unaware that the words utterly thrilled the ensign. “I am aboard the gig
Malcolm,
trailing you in orbit and out of line of sight, speaking via secure relay courtesy
Banquo.
All in my party are safe and sound. We request pickup.”

“I’m afraid
Duncan
can’t oblige, Sir. We have lost control of navigation and propulsion. The parasites got in when
Malcolm
launched.”

There was a dead, shocked silence in the cabin of the gig. Shoemaker felt as if his heart had just stopped.

“I say again we have lost control of the ship to the parasites,” Chu repeated. “And the parasites have restarted the fusion engines to take us out of orbit. They are powering up the jump gear. They want to reach another solar system.”

“And establish themselves there,” Spencer said, his voice steely cold. “Can you monitor the parasites? How long until they will be ready to jump the ship?”