Ark Royal

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Seen from a distance, Charles decided, Vera Cruz didn't look too different from Earth. Like most settled worlds, it was an orb glowing with green and blue light, mostly blue. There were no hints from orbit that humans had trod on its surface, but then there wouldn't be any hints on any such world, apart from Earth. The giant orbital towers — and a handful of other human constructions — were the only things large enough to be visible to the naked eye from orbit.

He allowed himself a moment of relief as the shuttle finally reached orbit and started to fall into the planet’s atmosphere. An hour of being crammed into his battlesuit inside a tiny shuttle didn't please him, even though there was no realistic alternative. Most of his accompanying squad had retreated into playing music or watching movies through their suit systems, even though the latter was frowned upon by senior officers. Charles was experienced enough not to blame them for wanting the distraction. Promising trainees had had to be removed from the program after discovering that they couldn't endure more than a few minutes of isolation in the suits.

The reporter seemed to be bearing up well, he decided, as the shuttle started to shake violently. There was no hope of hiding their existence any longer, so the pilot was trying to get them down on the ground as quickly as possible. Charles sucked in a breath as gravity started to catch at them, yanking the Marines around as the shuttle dropped lower and lower. As always, he had to fight to keep himself from throwing up. The suit’s systems would take care of it, he knew, yet it was never pleasant — and he would have to buy the drinks when the regiment next went on leave. It was the simplest way, they’d found, to discourage Marines from being sick in their suits.

There was a final series of shuddering motions that tore at the shuttle, then there was a final crash and silence. Charles staggered to his feet as the hatch opened, revealing the destroyed settlement right in front of them. The Marines gathered themselves and advanced outwards, weapons at the ready as they swept for potential threats. But nothing materialised to greet them.

The settlement was very basic; a handful of prefabricated buildings making up the centre of town, surrounded by a hundred houses and makeshift shacks built from local wood and stone. Shipping anything across interstellar distances was expensive, Charles knew; it made economic sense to start using local materials as soon as possible, even if some folks whined about pillaging natural resources on newly-discovered worlds. Besides, stone and wood were much easier to replace or rebuild than anything that had been dragged across dozens of light years from Earth.

It had once been a well-developed settlement, he knew. Now, it was a ruin. The metal buildings were melted, while the more natural constructions were burned-out ruins. His suit’s HUD identified some of the buildings — transit barracks, a schoolroom, the governor’s residence — but it was impossible to link the names with the destroyed buildings. The Marines spread out slowly, eying the blackened ruins as if they expected them to spring to life with hostile soldiers, yet nothing happened. They were completely alone.

“Check the buildings,” Charles ordered.

He knew he should remain with the shuttle, where he could coordinate the operation, but he couldn't keep himself from inspecting the schoolroom. Inside, it was a mess. The desks and chairs had been burned to ashes, while the small collection of electronic teaching aids were missing. There were no sign of any bodies. On the ground, he thought he saw a handful of tiny footprints, but he knew they could just be his imagination.

“They took the teaching aids,” he said, out loud. “What could they learn from those?”

“They could learn our language, for a start,” Sergeant Miles said. “One of my girlfriends used to say that a student could begin with no knowledge of English and master it through using one of those aids. I dare say the aliens are smarter than schoolchildren.”

Charles nodded as he backed out of the schoolroom. “What else could they learn?”

“Depends what modules were loaded in,” Miles admitted. “They’re produced in America, so the basics of English reading and writing are a given. Then there could be modules covering everything from basic human history to specialised Mexican history. Science and maths, farming instructions… this is a colony world, sir. They’ll have loaded as many modules as they could into the system.”

“I see,” Charles said. He hesitated, thinking hard. “They could speak to us.”

“They could,” Miles agreed. “And they could speak to the POWs, if they have any POWs from this colony.”

Charles nodded. The aliens might not be able to speak English properly — he agreed with the analysts that the shape of their mouths would probably prevent it — but they were definitely advanced enough to produce some kind of voder. Hell, he was fairly sure that Marine battlesuits could be adapted to produce sounds the aliens could understand. But if the aliens could talk to humans, but chose not to… what did that mean? Somehow, he doubted it boded well for the future.

“Hey,” Yang said. The reporter sounded unsteady; he’d been sick twice in the flight, according to the subroutine monitoring his suit. “Do you think the aliens took prisoners from here?”

“There are no bodies,” Charles said. “That suggests that the aliens took prisoners or destroyed the bodies… or there were survivors, who returned long enough to bury the bodies and then retreat. But there’s no sign of any survivors.”

He looked towards the forested hills in the distance. If there were survivors, it was unlikely they would risk showing themselves. They might not realise that the shuttle that had landed by the settlement was human. Instead, they might remain in hiding, convinced that the aliens had started to hunt them down again. He shook his head in bitter disbelief. No one had thought to come up with protocols for alien attack, certainly not on Vera Cruz. And that whole lack of preparation was biting them on the behind.

The remainder of the settlement was as uninformative as the schoolroom. All electronic devices seemed to have been looted, along with the bodies… and the remainder of the settlement had been scorched. Looking at the damage, Charles couldn't help wondering if the aliens had used grenades to destroy all traces of their presence, once they’d swept the colony and killed or captured the inhabitants. But they could have obliterated the entire colony from orbit, once they’d withdrawn. It made no sense.

Yang cleared his throat. “Shouldn't we try looking for survivors in the countryside?”

Charles snorted. “There’s twenty-two of us,” he pointed out. “We don’t even begin to have the manpower to search even a small part of the countryside. All we can do is sweep the settlement and hope any survivors decide to show themselves.”

He took one last look around the settlement, then called his Marines back to the shuttle. “We’ll leave a message behind,” he added. It was risky — if the aliens found it, they would realise that someone had been on the planet’s surface — but one he knew had to be taken. If there were survivors, at least they would know they hadn't been abandoned. “They will know we were here.”

“Sir,” one of his Marines said. “What will happen to the planet? I mean, once the war is won?”

“I have no idea,” Charles said. The Mexicans held clear title… assuming they could hang onto it while they struggled to pay their debts. But if the Captain was right and there was an alien world only one or two jumps from Vera Cruz, it was unlikely that the other interstellar powers would allow the Mexicans to keep the planet. They’d want to ship in reinforcements and planetary defences, then monitor the aliens indefinitely. “Why do you ask?”

“It's a beautiful world,” the Marine said. “I could apply for settlement here.”

“But very vulnerable,” Charles said. It wasn't uncommon for ex-soldiers, particularly SF operators, to be headhunted by colony world settlement corporations. Their training and experience made them good at keeping law and order on the frontier. “The aliens might be right next door.”

He took one final look into the distance, then cracked open his helmet. The air of Vera Cruz flooded in, a damp warmth tinged with smoke. He wondered, suddenly, if this desolation was the fate the aliens had in mind for Earth… then pushed the thought aside as he resealed his helmet and motioned for the Marines to return to the shuttle. They'd inspect one of the farms, but he wasn't hopeful. The colonists had been taken too badly by surprise to organise a resistance.

“Let's go,” he said.

Marcus wanted to crack open his own helmet as the shuttle made the brief hop from the settlement to one of the nearer farms, but he didn't quite dare. Who knew what might be present in the planet’s atmosphere? The Marines had booster shots that made them immune to almost every known disease, yet such broad-spectrum vaccines were rare outside the military. He forced himself to breathe through his mouth as the shuttle landed again, hitting the ground so hard he was sure they’d crashed, then followed the Marines out of the shuttle.

There was a farmhouse at one end of the field, a comfortable-looking building his briefing had identified as a Hacienda. Once, it had been intact; now, it’s walls were blackened and it was completely deserted, just like the buildings in the main settlement. Marcus remained outside as the Marines swept through the building, hunting for survivors or hints that someone, somewhere, was still alive. But they found nothing.

“Hey,” one of the Marines called. “I found a body!”

Marcus joined the general stampede towards the muddy ditch. A body lay at the bottom of the mud, clearly in an advanced state of decomposition. It was impossible to tell if it was male or female, young or old. One of the Marine stepped down into the ditch and took a DNA sample for later checking against the Mexican colony records. Marcus wondered, absently, if the body had been abandoned because no one knew it was there… or if no one had survived to come back and bury it. There was no way to tell.

“Female,” the Marine grunted. The suits could run basic checks, although without the records it was impossible to positively identify the body. “Around thirty years old, but too much damage to be sure.”

Poor bitch, Marcus thought. He’d seen horror before — he’d filmed horror for the jaded audiences in the civilised world — but this was something new. His imagination filled in all manner of scenarios. Maybe she'd been the proud owner of the farmhouse, running from the alien monsters that had destroyed her world; maybe she'd been the daughter of the farmhouse owner, trying to sneak around the aliens when they attacked. Or maybe she’d been a servant… there was no way to know. Her face would be broadcast all over the datanets, probably with a story composed to drum up support for the war, but she would never know it. God alone knew what had happened to the others.

“Leave the body here,” Major Parnell ordered. “We’re not equipped to take her with us.”

The Marines worked rapidly, digging a hole in the ground that would make a suitable grave. Marcus wanted to argue, wanted to point out that they could take her bones home, but he knew it would be futile. For all they knew, the aliens had left the body behind as a deliberate trap, although he privately considered it unlikely. The insurgents the civilised world fought regularly had a nasty habit of doing just that, but would the aliens understand the human urge to take care of dead bodies? It was quite possible that the aliens left their dead bodies to rot where they fell… or that they ate their own flesh and blood. There were so many fictional aliens invented by humans that he liked to think that they were ready for anything.

There was a pause when the body was placed into the makeshift grave. “Do you know what to say over her body?” One of the Marines asked. “She would be Catholic, wouldn't she?”

“Perhaps,” Parnell said. He stepped forward, composing himself. “My father was Isolated Catholic, but he never taught me prayers for the dead.”

He hesitated. “We do not know this girl’s name, our lord, and we do not know why or how she died,” he added. “But we ask that you take her in your loving arms and lead her to a better world than the one that killed her. Amen.”

The words sounded vaguely silly, Marcus thought, but there was a sincerity around them that outshone the prayers offered in Westminster Abbey. He made a mental note to ensure that the video of the brief ceremony was accidentally deleted. Someone would be bound to complain that the service hadn't been right, forcing the Royal Navy to waste time on rebuttals — at best. At worst, Major Parnell and his men might be punished, despite meaning well. No, it was better that the recording be destroyed forever.

“We’ll leave another message here,” Major Parnell said, as they headed back towards the shuttle. “But I’m not hopeful.”

Marcus couldn’t disagree. The aliens had systematically captured or killed every human on the planet — and they’d either taken or destroyed the bodies. Either way, he decided, it didn't bode well.

“No survivors,” Ted said, looking down at the images from Vera Cruz. “None at all.”

“There might be a handful hidden in the countryside,” Major Parnell offered. The Marine didn't look tired, but there was a weariness around him that made Ted want to send him straight to bed. “We have no idea just how capable the aliens are on the ground or what sort of surveillance systems they will deploy.”

Ted nodded. Human surveillance was good, but it could be jammed or disrupted by a well-prepared enemy. There was no way to know what the aliens might deploy on the ground, yet it was unlikely anything they had was far inferior to humanity’s systems. They certainly didn't dare assume otherwise.

“Surely the colonists would have seen them coming,” Fitzwilliam said. He looked up at Major Parnell. “Could your men have caught all of the colonists if you dropped from orbit?”

“If we were trying to drop in on their heads, we’d do a paraglide from the shuttles,” Parnell said. “Or we could risk a straight drop through the planet’s atmosphere, although I’d hate to try that against any kind of ground-based defences. Still, Vera Cruz had no defences at all. The colonists might even have assumed the aliens were human visitors until it was too late.”

Ted barely heard him. “The colonists might have been taken as prisoners,” he mused. “Do we know?”

“No, sir,” Parnell said. “We know nothing for sure. The bodies could easily have been carried some distance from the colony and buried — or simply vaporised. We don't know the aliens took prisoners. But if I was waging war on a newly-discovered alien race, I'd sure as hell want prisoners to study.”

“Assuming they think like us,” Fitzwilliam mused.

“They can't be that different,” Parnell said. “Even if they are homicidal monsters who find humans irredeemably ugly, surely they would want to know how to kill us.”

Ted shuddered. Human doctors and scientists without morals had performed chilling experiments on helpless test subjects, after carefully deeming them to be subhuman and thus not worthy of any legal protection. The aliens wouldn't even have to wonder if the humans deserved legal protection; they’d just start experimenting at will. After all, humans had happily carried out experiments on non-human creatures before even starting to reach into interstellar space.

“I think they’ve already mastered the art of killing humans,” Fitzwilliam said, sardonically. “Just ask the crews of Formidable and Invincible.”

“It doesn't matter,” Ted said. The concept of humans being used as alien test subjects — or even being kept in POW camps — was horrifying, but there was nothing they could do about it for the moment. “XO, how do we stand with the loading?”

Fitzwilliam glanced down at his terminal. “A few more hours to take on raw material, then compress it down into suitable projectiles,” he said. “Assuming we don’t get interrupted, we should be ready to make the next jump in a day or two.”

“Which will also give the crew a chance to rest,” Ted said. Not that they dared relax completely. The aliens had to suspect that Ark Royal needed to replenish her stocks of raw materials. If they were watching… he shuddered and put the thought out of his mind. Doing nothing might have been safer, but it was also futile. “We’ll jump through the unexplored tramline tomorrow, then. I feel rather exposed out here.”

“My men can return to inspect the remaining settlements,” Parnell offered. “Or even to try low-power signalling…”

Ted shook his head, firmly. “If there are survivors, we will have to hope they hold out until the end of the war,” he said. “One shuttle flight was dangerously revealing.”

The Marine looked as though he wanted to argue, but didn’t. Instead, he saluted and left the compartment. Ted watched him go, then turned back to the display. One tramline had been explored, the other… God alone knew where it went. No, that wasn't entirely accurate. They knew which star held the other end of the tramline; they just didn't know what might be orbiting that star. An alien homeworld… or merely a staging base?

“One day,” Ted said, out loud. “And then we will know.”