Genellan: Planetfall Read online

  "Here go a pattern of dinks and the last of the heavies," Buccari announced, her fingers playing the weapons panel. Distinct thumps vibrated through the ship, followed by a chorus of softer popping sounds. Quinn rotated the vessel, slewing it around and uncovering the arcing streaks of destruction as they vanished into interstellar distance. Buccari scanned tactical. The approaching target converged with datum. The range selector activated, automatically resetting the scale and moving the enemy ship back to the rim of the display.

  Wilson: "Thousand clicks. Maneuvering away from our missiles. No deception, but heavy jamming. Jump-shifting through it with full systems lock-on. Hard lock."

  Buccari verified weapons configuration and optics alignment. She scanned tactical. Targeting reticules were perfectly aligned. The next salvo from the alien would blast them to eternity. She clenched the firing grip, moving the trigger guard aside.

  "Okay, Gunner. Roger lock," Buccari replied, surprised at her own calmness. "Program firing the load. Stand by cannon. Confirm power status." She punched another button and salvos of missiles sprayed outward at the oncoming destruction.

  Wilson responded immediately: "Power up. Board's steady. All systems check. Ready to fire!"

  Buccari reverified lock-on and then glanced into the blackness of space. The corvette's missiles were painfully visible—blasts of hot-white fire streaking to starboard, punching into the vacuum in regular intervals, each meteor a shining sliver of steel and depleted uranium. Why hadn't the bug fired? Suddenly her eyes caught an impossibly faint and distant glimmering. She concentrated her focus on a point at infinity and detected the unmistakable bloom of a colossal explosion, reduced to a pinpoint of light by the immense intervening distances.

  Wilson: "Six hundred, and—sir! Bogey's fading out! Enemy tracking and fire-control radars have gone down, too. He's…gone. Completely off the screen! Something—the kinetics must have taken him out!"

  Buccari turned to tactical. Warning detects flashed, but the cursors had all returned home, and nowhere was there a threat blip. Warning detects extinguished as she watched.

  "Something's wrong," she said, releasing her grip from the cannon trigger. "The bogey decoyed our ordnance. I show no weapons tracks as confirmed hits."

  She reset the laser scanners. Nothing! She lifted her head and looked out the viewscreens, and then she turned toward Quinn, gloved hand resting atop her helmet.

  "It's gone. destroyed," she announced incredulously.

  The manic tones of the threat warning klaxon stuttered to silence, the only sound the susurrant rush of oxygen through the respirators of their battle armor.

  "Let's get the lifeboat," Quinn said, his voice hoarse. He hit the maneuvering alarm.

  Chapter 2. Lifeboat

  The lifeboat oscillated, gently wobbling as pinhead jets fired for stabilization. Once jettisoned from the overwhelming mass of the corvette it was powerless to do anything but float through space on the impulse vector provided at ejection.

  Leslie Lee quelled her incipient panic and took note of the injured Marine's elevated temperature and rapid pulse rate. The other lifeboat occupants were strapped in racks protruding from the sides of the cylindrical vessel. Six of the eight stations were occupied. Lee unstrapped from her control station and floated through the restricted tubular core. Rennault was unconscious, his arm broken. Lee suspected the spacer Marine had suffered internal injuries. She enriched his oxygen and fed a plasma solution through the IV port on his pressure suit. Fenstermacher, the other injured man, was coming around. In addition to broken bones, the boatswain's mate had thrown up in his space suit.

  Both men had been injured early in the engagement. Rennault had failed to strap in and was hurled around the cabin by the first frantic course changes. He would have been pounded to death and could have inflicted damage on equipment and other personnel had not the wiry Fenstermacher risked a similar fate by partially unstrapping and tackling Rennault in midflight. Fenstermacher had tethered them both down, secure enough to keep from flying about, but not enough to escape the thrashing inflicted by the pounding g-loads.

  Fenstermacher struggled to lift his head; his inertia reels were locked. Lee released the locks, and the injured man turned to face her, peering unsteadily from behind a smeared visor.

  "Smells sweet in there, eh?" Lee chided as she leaned over and used a penlight to check pupil dilation. It was difficult to see through the contaminated visor. She leaned over further to check his left arm, which was immobilized by an inflatable cast. Lee dimly sensed pressure on the front of her suit. Fenstermacher moaned with a peculiar, melancholy tone. Startled by his exclamations, and mistaking them for a signal of pain, Lee backed off sufficiently to see Fenstermacher' s right hand wandering suggestively across her chest. The suit provided no hint of anatomical topography, and its coarse stiffness barely transmitted the sensation of contact, but Fenstermacher persistently continued his exertions, groaning lasciviously. She looked down at his hand and tiredly brushed it away, smiling wistfully at the presumptions of the living.

  "Fool," she said quietly, thickly, near tears.

  "Ah, don't worry, Les," said Fenstermacher, breaking lifeboat regulations by speaking, his voice feeble. "We'll make it. Someone will pick us up."

  "Yeah, Leslie," said another voice—Dawson' s. Lee looked over to station three to see the communication technician's helmet lift from the harness. "For once in his life, Fensterprick is right."

  "Why, thank you, gruesome," said Fenstermacher hoarsely. "I take back what I said about you being stupid and ugly. You're just ugly."

  "He ain't worth getting angry over," Dawson retorted, "but I sure hope he's in pain. Leslie, either knock him out or make him scream."

  "Fleet's gone," another voice grumbled—Tookmanian, one of the weapons technicians. "We are forsaken. Only He will save us now."

  "Not now, Tooks," admonished Schmidt, the other weapons rating.

  "Praise the Lord," echoed another voice—Gordon, the youngest of the spacer Marines.

  "Thanks, but I'll put my faith in Commander Quinn and Lieutenant Buccari," Dawson replied. "If anyone can get us out of this, they can."

  "The lieutenant sure took a bite out of your tall, skinny tail," Fenstermacher sniped.

  "She was doing her job, and I was doing mine, pukebrains," Dawson said cheerfully. "Buccari knows what she's doing. She can yell at me any time she wants."

  "Okay, you guys," Lee said. "We got rules. Can the chatter." The petty officer sighed helplessly and looked about the cramped interior of the cylinder. She floated to her station, noting that the solar cells had deployed. The lifeboat was close to a star; electrical power would not be a problem; the lights would be on when they suffocated. She swallowed hard and endeavored to concentrate, but anxiety swept over her. Aliens! The fleet was gone and the corvette was in trouble. She was frightened.

  An indicator flashed. An aural alarm buzzed. Lee reconnected her helmet lead and heard Ensign Hudson trying to raise her.

  "Life One is up," she reported, failing to keep her voice calm.

  "Roger, One. The bug ship was flashed!" Hudson replied excitedly. "We made it. for now anyway. I'm coming to get you. You having problems?"

  "No, sir. Everything's okay. I was checking on the injured." Lee strapped in as she spoke, relieving her tension with activity. Noting that her passengers were reasonably calm and breathing normally, she punched a digital switch several times, thinning the oxygen being metered to her charges; any oxygen saved now might mean another few minutes of existence.

  "How're they doing? I hear Fenstermacher's a hero," Hudson said.

  "A real dumb one. And he puked in his pajamas to boot." She realized radio communications were being fed to every station in the lifeboat. She turned around and looked back at Fenstermacher. His good arm hung out into the aisle with its thumb up.

  "Stop moving. You know the regs!" she commanded. "Fenstermacher, arm back by your side or I'll knock you out!" Fenstermacher' s arm re
treated but not before his erect thumb was replaced by his middle digit. She switched off communications to the cabin.

  Hudson continued to transmit: "You'll hear contact on your hull in less than a minute. I'm going to secure you with the grapple."

  "Mr. Hudson, the fleet jumped. What're we going to do?" Lee asked.

  "First things first, Lee. Let's get you rigged and docked, and then we'll take the next step. If it's any consolation, I'm scared silly, too. Hang on."

  "Yes, sir," she replied, gaining reassurance that her lifeboat would soon be taken in tow, relieving her of being alone and easing the burden of powerless responsibility. Suppressing thought, she concentrated on the many checklist items left to do.

  * * *

  "Established in hyperlight, sir. Admiral…did you copy? Stable jump," reported Captain Wells, the flag operations officer. "Sir, are you all right?"

  Fleet Admiral Robert Runacres floated at the perimeter barrier of the flag bridge. Even in the null gravity of the operations core he appeared to lean heavily on the railing, clenched hands and thick legs spread wide, the weight of concern bowing his helmet low. T.L.S. Eire's bridge watch, in battle dress, moved professionally below, but anxious glances were flashed in his direction. Runacres slowly unbent his neck and scanned the displays. Red emergency signals continued to flash on annunciator panels, defining the ill-fated mothership's status.

  "Admiral, we need to shore up Greenland's sector," Wells said. "She's gone, Admiral. We caught her in the grid, but she's dead. No signals, no links. They've recovered some lifeboats."

  "I see that, Franklin," Runacres said, pushing over to the tactical consoles. The flag duty officers—a tactical watch officer and assistant—were strapped into a horseshoe-shaped station at the lowest point of the flag bridge. Runacres looked down at the constantly updating status panels.

  "Baffin or N.Z. report in yet?" Runacres asked.

  "No, sir," the tactical officer reported. Several ships had broken radio discipline during the melee and were continuing to do so in the safety of hyperspace. Baffin and Novaya Zemlya, in the rear guard, had not been involved in the action, their captains wisely refraining from adding to the communications tumult. Greenland, in the van, had been the only mothership to take hits.

  Aliens! He had found an alien race. But at what cost? Runacres straightened, removed the helmet from his slick-shaven head, and rubbed red-rimmed, watery blue eyes with gloved fists, shaking the fatigue and uncertainty from his ruddy countenance. He pushed off from tactical and floated past the stepped-up bridge stations, between the consoles manned by his somber operations officer and that of the corvette group leader, to his own command station.

  "Terminate General Quarters," Runacres commanded, pulling himself into his tethers.

  "Aye, aye, Admiral," Wells replied. The burly ops officer removed his helmet and touched a series of keys on his console. He mounted a delicate earpiece on his sweat-shiny, shaven head and began issuing orders on the network.

  Runacres signaled the tactical officer. "Updated damage report."

  "Aye, aye, Admiral," she replied, vigorously keying her console. Commander Ito floated into position behind the admiral. Runacres lifted his hand without looking up, and the aide placed a squeeze tube in the admiral's palm. Runacres squirted the sweet contents down his throat and waited for the energy rush.

  "Damage report, Admiral," said the tactical officer.

  "Go," said Runacres.

  "Greenland destroyed. Catastrophic hull penetration, thermal runaway on reactor drives. Twenty-two survivors reported in lifeboats. Retrieval underway."

  "Oh, God," Runacres groaned. Twenty-two survivors out of a crew of four hundred; but he had found an alien race. A race of killers?

  "Preliminary indications are Tasmania sustained damage from a near maximum range energy beam—our own," continued the tactical officer. "Friendly fire stripped away positioning and communication gear but caused no structural damage. Tierra del Fuego reports moderate damage from acceleration stress and light radiation exposures."

  "Tasmania's corvettes were recovered prior to jumping," added the group leader. "Peregrine One, Jake Carmichael's ship, took out three alien interceptors. One TDF corvette, Osprey Two, is missing. Skipper of Osprey One confirms that Osprey Two was destroyed in action before the fleet jumped. Osprey One and Two are both credited with single kills."

  Runacres grunted.

  "Four of Greenland's corvettes were recovered," continued the group leader. "Harrier One, Jack Quinn's 'vette, last reported engaged with alien units, is missing, presumed left behind. Quinn was covering the flight's return to grid." His report complete, the group leader sat nervously silent. Runacres stared at a point far beyond the bulkhead of his space ship.

  "All other ships are operating normally, with all hands accounted for," said Wells, breaking the depressing silence. "Hyperlight grid is stable, but Greenland's grid sector is being patched at long range by Britannia and Kyushu."

  Runacres digested the information, a dizzy sensation making it hard to concentrate. Aliens. And two corvettes and a mothership—over four hundred spacers, the cream of the fleet— destroyed or left behind, marooned in time and space. There was nothing to be done. His command, the Tellurian Legion Main Fleet, was withdrawing, committed to returning to Sol system. The emergency recall was automatic, the jump coordinates pre-set. Now they had to hold the grid up long enough to make the twenty parsec HLA transit—four standard months.

  Greenland's grid sector was Runacres's first concern. Should the links degrade catastrophically, the grid matrix would unload, dumping the fleet light years from Sol. If that happened, it would take many more months, perhaps years, to get home.

  "Franklin," Runacres ordered. "Flagship to assume grid duty."

  Wells raised the flagship's skipper: "Maneuver Eire to grid sector one at best speed. Relieve Greenland on station." Runacres studied the Eire's amphitheater bridge two decks below. He watched and listened as Captain Sarah Merriwether directed her bridge team and noted with satisfaction the efficiency and teamwork ingrained in her crew.

  "On the way, Frank," Merriwether responded, her drawl deep and resonant. "It's Shaula all over again, isn't it, Admiral?"

  "Perhaps, Sarah," Runacres answered quietly, looking down at her upturned helmet. "And perhaps not. We survived this time. No one survived Shaula System."

  "The fleet wasn't armed twenty-five years ago, Admiral," said Merriwether. "Being able to shoot back made the difference." "Progress," Runacres grumbled.

  Chapter 3. Orbit

  Buccari felt the smile on her face, the exaltation of survival painfully stretching the lagging muscles of her cheeks. Her attention returned to the reality of their predicament: the alien ships may have been destroyed, but the task force had retreated into hyperlight, stranding them in a strange and hostile system. Her smile relaxed. The muscles in the back of her jaw tightened.

  "Skipper, recommend we safe the pulse laser," Buccari said.

  Commander Quinn stirred, switching off the arming master. "Do you have contact with Hudson?" he asked.

  "Yes, sir. They're still up on docking radar. Give me a second and I'll get you a vector," Buccari said, deselecting firing circuits.

  "Engineering! Status on main engines?" Quinn demanded.

  Rhodes's booming voice responded: "Sixty-eight percent usable power, but the system is haywired to beat the devil, and the governors may not respond. Cannon coming down. Main engines ready in three minutes."

  Buccari established laser link with the EPL and began receiving telemetry. As she identified the lifeboat beacon she noticed a proximity alert on the navigation display.

  "Commander," Buccari interrupted, urgently.

  "Yeah," Quinn answered.

  "Sir, Hudson has grappled the lifeboat. On this vector he'll bring the lander alongside in fifteen minutes. But we have another problem!"

  "What now?" Quinn asked as he punched in the rendezvous heading.

  "The
planet…R-K Three. At this course and speed we're heading into first-order gravitational field effect, maybe even a reentry." Buccari reset the range indicator on tactical; a blinkingplanet symbol glowed ominously in sector two, and the course indicator pointed to an intersection on the orbital plane. Quinn hit the maneuvering alarm and fired a bank of thrusters, shifting the ship's attitude. The planet pitched slowly into view, fully illuminated except for a thin crescent of darkness. The pilot maneuvered until the planet was dead ahead.

  "Look at that!" Buccari gasped. It was close, already starting to fill the viewscreen—and beautiful—swirls of brown, green, blue, and white marbled the brilliant body. Blue and white! Water and clouds! she thought, her hopes rising.

  "Set parameters for a standard reconnaissance orbit," Quinn said. "Any mass data? Any electromagnetic traffic?"

  "Sensors are pretty chewed up. Computer's only processing spectral data," she replied. "No output yet. No indications of electromagnetic emissions. Nothing. Electronically, it's uninhabited."

  "My wife said—" Quinn choked on his own words. "How're we doing on the mains?" he asked.

  Buccari sighed and checked her engine instruments. "Restart check complete," she said. "Auxiliary backups functional. Generators are fluctuating outside spec, but Rhodes hasn't tried cross-connecting. He's doing that now." Buccari pivoted in her tethers and stretched to flip a switch on the overhead power console. She began the system checks required to set up orbit.

  "Roger, restart," answered Quinn wistfully.

  Lifeboat pick-up went without incident. With the crew returned to their duty stations, final preparations for orbit began.

  "Survey systems are still hammered, but the computer has synthesized a preliminary mass analysis," Hudson said, back at his station.

  Buccari interrogated her primary monitor and examined the computer data. The planet, designated Rex-Kaliph Three, was smaller than Earth, at.91g on the surface. Precise flight-path calculations indicated the corvette was not on an collision course; without additional course or speed changes, it would pass the planet on a severely divergent trajectory, receiving a gravity sling into an elliptical solar orbit. A fiery collision with the planet would have been preferable—preferable to being catapulted without fuel or food deep into space.