Invincible

EIGHT

“Tell them to leave it alone!” Geary said.

The images of General Charban and Emissary Rione, locked all this time in attempts to communicate with the spider-wolves, exchanged looks. “We’re not sure we have the means yet to tell them something like that,” Charban said diplomatically.

“Try. You’ve got the civilian experts down there working with you, right? All of you get that message across. We do not want that bear-cow warship destroyed. It is ours.”

Spider-wolf warships had clustered around the crippled superbattleship, but since the Kick vessel retained its shields, its armor, and its weapons, the spider-wolves were keeping at a safe distance, pinging shots futilely off the still-powerful defenses of the enemy.

Most of the spider-wolves, though, were harrying the surviving bear-cow warships still accelerating in a stampede for the jump point. It would be most of a day before the Kicks got there, even going hell-for-leather as they were, but the spider-wolves were making sure they kept going.

Ending his call to Charban and Rione, Geary sat back, rubbing his forehead. His eyes reluctantly went to his display to see the latest information. The human fleet was slowly drawing back together, licking its wounds, destroyers and light cruisers darting through the vast area of the recent battle to pick up escape pods carrying crew members from destroyed human warships. Geary hadn’t spotted any spider-wolf ships destroyed during the battle, leading to a rising bitterness in him, but when he replayed the last charge against the bear-cows, he saw that the spider-wolves had joined in, diving into the heart of the Kick armada to help break the enemy and losing several ships in the process. Small lifeboats from those destroyed spider-wolf ships had been scooped up by other spider-wolf craft almost as soon as they ejected.

But his first impression had been right. There had been no lifeboats or escape pods from any bear-cow warship.

Escape pods. He checked the status of recovery efforts on his fleet’s escape pods, seeing that the light cruisers ordered to carry out that task were well along at it. Except for—“Is there a spider-wolf ship picking up one of our escape pods?” He wasn’t sure what to feel. Gratitude? Outrage? Fear?

“The pod was heavily damaged,” Desjani said. “It’s off Balestra. Maybe the spider-wolves are seeing if it needs assistance. Quarte is on its way to that pod but still half an hour from pickup.”

“Get ahold of someone on that pod,” Geary ordered. “Let me know as soon as you do.”

Because of the distances involved, that meant nearly ten minutes of waiting before an image rendered jerky by damaged comm equipment on the pod finally appeared before Geary. He could see the interior of the pod, crowded with survivors from Balestra, both the survivors and the pod itself bearing wounds from the destruction of their light cruiser.

Some of the survivors drifted, too injured to act, while others flung themselves about the packed inside of the escape pod to patch up equipment and their fellows. Geary could see the emergency supply lockers open, their shelves already stripped of tools, medical supplies, and spare parts. The two rolls of duct tape that every escape pod carried as standard equipment were in use. A strip of duct tape already covered a patch on one wall, doubtless sealing a weak point or leak, and another band of tape was being used to help repair something inside an opened equipment panel. A corpsman, working frantically, was in the act of slapping duct tape over a chest wound on one sailor whose splinted arm was being bound up by another sailor.

At the air lock stood two shapes in space armor. Whereas the actual spider-wolves were incredibly repulsive to the human eye, their space armor resembled their ships in its smooth lines and beautiful engineering. The spider-wolves showed six limbs in the armor, but their appearance was otherwise concealed by the protective gear.

“This is Chief Petty Officer Madigan, combat systems, light cruiser Balestra,” a sailor with a bruise covering one side of his face reported. “The… the… aliens have boarded us, but haven’t done anything but watch. The situation in here is stabilized, but we need pickup soonest. Uh, senior officer aboard is Lieutenant Junior Grade Sidera, but she’s unconscious.”

Geary breathed a sigh of relief. “Chief Madigan, there’s a light cruiser on the way. Hang on. I think the spider-wolves came aboard to see if you needed assistance. I’ll get a battle cruiser over your way.” That was the fastest ship he could send with a large medical compartment and doctors aboard. It would take another several minutes for Chief Madigan to hear that reassurance, but he seemed to have the situation under control. “Good work. We’ll get you picked up soon.”

“Dragon,” Desjani said. “She’s the closest battle cruiser to them.”

He ordered Dragon into motion, then clenched his eyes shut, trying to refocus on other issues.

“What’s the name of the star?” Desjani asked. She looked tired, but relieved. Dauntless had taken damage, but aside from a few wounded had lost no crew members this time.

“I don’t know,” Geary said. “Why does it matter?”

“Ships died here, Admiral. Sailors died here. We should have a name for where they died.”

He closed his eyes again, embarrassed not to have thought of that. Part of him wanted a dark name, but another part said that this star marked the graves of dead humans and should reflect their sacrifice and courage. Something that said humans had placed their mark here, far beyond their own borders, fighting to save their comrades. “Is there a star named Honor?”

“Honor?” Desjani questioned, then checked the database. “No. That’s not a name… but you get to use any name you want, Admiral.”

“It’s for them,” he said.

“I understand.” She paused, then managed a smile. “It’s a good name to remember them by. Permission to enter the name Honor for this star in the fleet database.”

“Granted.”

Jane Geary had survived the charge she had led though Dreadnaught had suffered extensive damage. Captain Badaya, looking unusually subdued, had volunteered that Jane Geary had made that move on her own initiative while he was still trying to figure out how to save his other warships. Orion, already beaten up from fighting at Pandora, had been hammered again, but Commander Shen had, with considerable annoyance at the question, declared his ship still fit for battle.

The amount of damage inflicted on Dreadnaught, Orion, Relentless, Reprisal, Superb, and Splendid proved the old maxim that while battleships might take a while to get where they needed to go, once there they were amazingly hard to kill. Still, had the bear-cow commander peeled off even one of the superbattleships with some escorts and sent it after those six beat-up battleships, they probably wouldn’t have survived the fight.

Quarte reached the damaged escape pod from Balestra, the two spider-wolves on the pod withdrawing into their own ship as the light cruiser approached, the spider-wolf ship then soaring off in a grand leap back to its fellows. Dragon was still twenty minutes from reaching both Quarte and the damaged pod, but was coming on fast.

Geary thought about medical personnel all over the fleet, not just on Dragon, struggling with a tidal wave of injured personnel, sick bays and hospitals filled with those in desperate need of care for their wounds. Nowadays if someone made it to a hospital they were unlikely to die no matter how bad their injuries, but even then sometimes not enough could be done. “How do they do it?” he wondered aloud. Desjani turned a questioning glance his way, for once not reading his mind. “Doctors, nurses, corpsmen, medics, all of them,” Geary explained. “Sometimes, no matter what they do, the people they’re trying to help still die. How do they keep going?”

She pondered that. “How do you keep going? Knowing that no matter how well you do, people will still die?”

That stung, yet he saw her logic. “I guess I think about how much worse things would be if I didn’t do everything I could.”

“Yeah. Works for me, too. Usually.”

Captain Smythe was once again proving his value, coordinating a huge amount of repair activity around the fleet, his engineers running on caffeine and chocolate to keep working (“The food of the gods,” in Smythe’s words. “When the old myths talked about nectar and ambrosia, they meant coffee and chocolate.”), the eight auxiliaries each mated with or closing on one of the most badly hurt warships.

Commander Lommand of Titan had offered his resignation, which Geary had declined along with an order to Lommand to use his considerable talents to get ships fixed up, including his own.

The fleet administrative system popped up another alert, explaining in dispassionate terms that available storage for dead personnel had been exceeded and recommending burials be undertaken.

As he read that last, Geary knew that if he threw anything at the display or punched it the blows would just go through the virtual information, leaving it unmarred. He was nonetheless tempted. “General Charban, Emissary Rione, we also need to know as quickly as possible, after we get across to the spider-wolves to lay off the last superbattleship, whether we can safely bury our dead in this star system.”

Rione looked away, but Charban nodded slowly. “I understand, Admiral.”

He undoubtedly did understand, Geary reflected. The ground forces had also often taken hideous casualties in the war, waging battles across entire worlds and devastating wide portions of those worlds in the process. How many soldiers had Charban lost in battle? How many times had those soldiers spent their lives, only to have the ground they had died for be abandoned with the next shift in strategy, or when the Alliance fleet was driven away and ground forces had to leave before Syndic warships rained death from orbit upon them?

Geary had slept through a century of that, while such sacrifices formed the men and women around him. Desjani would occasionally remind him, sometimes angrily, that he could not understand them even if they needed his reminders of the things their ancestors had believed in before the war warped those caught in it.

And now more of them had died in as vicious a fight as any during the war. He had managed to help them survive that war. Could he manage to ensure that these men and women survived peace?

“Admiral,” Rione called from the conference room aboard Dauntless where frantic attempts at communications with the spider-wolves continued, “we have gotten across to the people here that we will deal with the last superbattleship.”

“The people here?” It took him a moment to understand that. “You mean the spider-wolves?”

“Yes, Admiral.” Her voice took on a reproving cast. “We must think of them as people. Because they are people.”

“Exceptionally ugly people,” Desjani murmured.

He gave her a warning look before turning back to Rione’s image. “Thank you. I’ll do my best.”

Rione’s smile was pained. “I understand how hard that will be. Believe me.”

“Make sure you and General Charban take some breaks. You’ve been at this continuously for hours now.” Once Rione’s image vanished, Geary bent to his display. He had to start moving ships toward the crippled superbattleship drifting through this star system, ensuring that the spider-wolves didn’t question the human claim to it.

Some of the Alliance warships had only been moving toward an intercept with the superbattleship for half an hour when another alert pulsed. Geary, still anticipating a massive act of self-destruction by the bear-cows trapped on their ship, jerked as if he had been bitten.

But there was no marker showing a spreading cloud of debris where the superbattleship had been. Instead, that ship remained, but oddly changed. “Now what?”

A portion of the crippled superbattleship had been torn outward, making Geary think for a moment that an internal explosion had ripped the warship, too small to destroy it but enough to blow off a large piece. But within seconds it was clear that the detached piece was under power and shaped like a smaller version of one of the bear-cow ships. Where it had rested, cradled mostly inside the superbattleship, a matching depression now showed.

“Escape craft,” Lieutenant Castries reported. “Accelerating for the jump point.”

They had finally found an escape craft on a bear-cow ship. But only one? And configured for such speed and endurance? “Surely they don’t have the whole crew on that,” Geary said.

“No,” Desjani replied. “That would be impossible.”

The human ships were still too far from the superbattleship to intercept the escape ship, but spider-wolf warships were slewing about and leaping toward new prey.

“Do we want to warn them off that escape ship?” Desjani asked.

“I’m not sure we have time,” Geary said. Just the amount of time needed for a message to reach those spider-wolf ships was longer than it would take the first of them to achieve an intercept.

Desjani nodded in tight-lipped agreement. “I guess they’re going to blow the wreck now.”

“Maybe.” Geary frowned at his display. “That thing is big for an escape craft, but it’s still less than half the size of a destroyer.”

“About a third the mass and length,” Desjani agreed. “Lieutenant Castries, get me an estimate of how many Kicks could be on that escape ship.

The reply took a moment. “Our systems estimate the escape craft was designed to carry a maximum of one hundred creatures the size of the Kicks,” Castries reported. “That’s if they were crammed in, and if their equipment took about the same amount of internal space as standard human layouts. At the lower end, it might service as few as twenty Kicks.”

“One hundred at most.” Desjani made a face. “That superbattleship could easily have a crew of thousands.”

“Maybe a lot of automation,” Geary speculated. “No. Some of the videos we’ve seen take place on ships, and those showed many bear-cows crowding them. But only a hundred at the very most had a means of escape.” The answer came to him then. “The officers. The commanding officer, his or her staff, maybe family if they do that. The leaders of this part of the herd, leaving that herd behind while they head for safety.”

“I prefer the term ‘herd-leaders,’” Desjani said sharply. “Officers should never abandon their crews, and there are no signs that huge warship has any other escape craft.”

“Some bear-cows are more equal than others,” Geary said. “That shouldn’t be a surprise. We knew they had leaders, and leaders can easily become an elite caste.”

“Like the Syndics.”

“Maybe. In some ways.” Though even the Syndics had put escape pods on their warships. But then the Syndics didn’t have at least thirty billion spare worker bear-cows packed cheek to jowl. “These herd-leaders may be running, but they won’t get away.”

Desjani smiled, letting out a small laugh. “Too many spiders blocking their way.”

Indeed, right now the spider-wolf ships bearing down on the escape craft amid a welter of curving intercept vectors resembled a web rapidly ensnaring the fleeing bear-cow commander.

For its size, the escape craft had impressive shields. But it couldn’t carry much armor, not and stay swift and agile, and it had few weapons, which fired desperately at the converging spider-wolf warships as they closed in for firing runs.

A score of spider-wolf ships slashed at the escape craft in attacks that collapsed its shields, penetrated its hull, then must have triggered a core overload. As the spider-wolf attackers curved away after their strikes, only a blossoming field of debris remained of the escape ship.

“I guess the spiders weren’t interested in prisoners,” Desjani remarked. “Why did the commander run? They’d have been safer staying on the superbattleship.”

“That ship is doomed,” Geary said. “Perhaps the commander panicked, perhaps we’re going to see it self-destruct now, and the commander didn’t want to go out that way.”

“The commander went out that way anyway,” Desjani said dryly, pointing toward the remnants of the escape ship. “Hmmm. They would have been well clear of that crippled ship by now. Even a worst-case estimate of the blast radius shows they would have been out of danger from that. Why hasn’t it blown?”

“A booby trap? Like Captain Smythe suggested with Invincible? The bear-cows have rigged their superbattleship to blow up when we try to board?”

“Or something went wrong,” Desjani suggested. “Or the Kicks left aboard aren’t interested in being blown to pieces. Or they never intended doing an overload. I checked the records of the engagement. None of the crippled Kick ships self-destructed. The spider-wolves blew apart any that were crippled but still intact.”

“When did you have a chance to go over the records of the engagement?” Geary wondered, thinking of everything that he had been doing since the battle ended.

“I used my copious free time. One second here, one second there… it adds up.”

Geary clenched his fists. “There’s still a chance we can capture that thing.”

“Yes,” Desjani agreed. “But whoever goes aboard will face the possibility of the superbattleship blowing up once they’re inside, as well as fighting thousands of Kicks who will probably fight to the death to avoid getting eaten alive, which they would expect us awful predators to do. Have I ever told you why I didn’t become a Marine?”

“I know you’ve led boarding parties,” Geary said, recalling the Alliance Fleet Cross medal that Desjani never spoke about except in vague terms.

“When I was young and foolish.” She shook her head. “Still no self-destruct. Hey, I thought of something. The spider-wolf tactics and weapons alone wouldn’t have taken down that armada, even though the spider-wolves must have some way of stopping the Kicks.”

“You already mentioned that.”

“Did I? This part I just thought of. Maybe the Kicks haven’t lost ships in hostile systems. Their battles have been at home or they’ve been able to get everyone who wasn’t blown apart home. They wouldn’t have procedures or plans for scuttling ships because it never happened. I mean, look at that thing.” She waved toward the image of the superbattleship. “Would you expect to have that thing trapped and helpless?”

“It’s not exactly helpless. Weapons and shields are still operational. And what about that escape ship?”

“Good point. The leaders aboard that thing must have had reasons to expect to need to be able to leave. Could that have been the armada flagship?”

“It could have been.” A fleet commander would need some means of leaving a crippled ship during a fight so they could continue the battle from another flagship. “But even if you’re right, that doesn’t mean it would be impossible for the crew left on that battleship to rig up a means of self-destruct. We just don’t know.”

Desjani nodded toward her display. “The survivors of the armada are still running for the jump point. Forty-one ships. I’m glad the spider-wolves are chasing them because even I don’t feel like that right now. But if the last Kick ship leaves this star system, and the superbattleship is still intact, we’re going to have to decide whether to run the risks of trying to take it.”

“I’m going to have to decide,” Geary corrected.

The image of General Carabali gestured toward the display in Geary’s stateroom. “This is about that ship?”

“Yes, General.” Geary zoomed the display in on the crippled superbattleship. “Can your Marines take it?”

“Can we? Yes, Admiral, I am confident of that. What I can’t be confident about is how much it might cost.”

That was the big question. “I understand. In light of that, I need your best assessment on whether we should try to take it,” Geary said.

Carabali paused, thinking. “There are a lot of unknowns. We have only a general idea of current Kick individual combat capability, based on some of the videos we intercepted. But you know how much movies can vary from reality, and we don’t know if what we’ve seen are movies or documentaries. We also don’t know how many Kicks are still aboard that ship. I wouldn’t estimate less than a thousand, but it could be much more. A ship that size could hold ten thousand if they wanted to put that many aboard.”

“Ten thousand?” Geary asked in amazement. “That’s your estimate of the crew size?”

“No, sir. That’s our top end. The most plausible estimate of crew size is five or six thousand. That’s a lot of Kicks.” Carabali paused as she found her train of thought again. “We know nothing about the layout of the ship. During a normal boarding operation, my Marines would head for certain critical areas, gaining control of the power core controls, the bridge, and other vital places. We don’t know where those are in this ship or what form their controls take.”

“We don’t even know if they have compartments like that as we understand them,” Geary agreed.

“The internal layout…” Carabali shrugged. “The Kicks are a lot smaller than us. The size of their passageways might be very tight for a Marine in combat armor. Even if we have a firepower advantage on a Marine-to-Kick basis, employing that firepower might be difficult. It all adds up to a very challenging operation, something more like an assault on a fort than a ship-boarding operation.”

It wasn’t a pretty picture, but the Marine general hadn’t said it wasn’t doable. Indeed, she had said it could be done. The question remained whether the gains from seizing that ship justified the risks of trying to capture it. Captain Smythe and the civilian experts had already weighed in, all of them enthralled by the prospect of being able to exploit such a capture for information about the bear-cows and their technology.

Conceivably, there might be the clues aboard the ship that could lead to human discovery of how to build that defense against orbital bombardment. The value of that one thing alone would justify almost any price. Almost any sacrifice. “But you can do it.” Geary made that a statement, not a question this time.

“Yes, sir. Assuming the Kicks don’t blow the ship to hell before we can stop them. Before the landing operation can commence we’ll need to have the warship’s external defenses reduced, and we’ll need close support after that. That means significant fleet assets located near that huge ship, where they would also be endangered if it self-destructs.”

“Understood.” He would be committing a lot of his limited numbers of ships and Marines to this attack. If the bear-cows were just waiting to lure in humans, then they could destroy everything that Geary sent into or close to that superbattleship. There was a real chance that he could take hideous losses and gain nothing.

But if he didn’t take any risks, he was guaranteed to gain nothing, guaranteed to pass up the sort of opportunity that might never come again.

“Begin your planning,” Geary ordered. “Assume you have use of any available assets. I’ll be planning to use every warship necessary to take down the alien defenses before the Marines go in. It’s going to be a dirty job, but I know you can do it.”

Carabali saluted, smiling sardonically. “That’s why you have Marines along, to do the dirty jobs no one else wants or can do. When do you want my plan, Admiral?”

“As soon as possible, but take the time you need to get it right. We’re not going anywhere until a lot more repairs have been done on our damaged ships.”

“I understand, sir. Our planning in this case is going to be simplified by the lack of detailed knowledge. We’re going to have to do a lot of this op on the fly once we get inside that thing. Fortunately, Marines are good at that.”

Geary sat down after Carabali’s image had vanished, lowering his face into both hands as he thought about how many men and women had already died in this star system and how many more might die as a result of this decision.

The superbattleship spun slowly through space, the depression where the escape craft had rested occasionally coming into sight as the warship rolled. It showed few signs of damage except at the stern, where the main propulsion units had been mangled by at least one powerful blow, which had apparently set off sympathetic explosions. “Their main engineering spaces may be destroyed,” Captain Smythe had suggested. “If that’s the case, they would have had to shut down the power core, or whatever they use.”

“Why do they still have shields up and weapons working?” Geary asked.

“A secondary power source for those purposes. Both shields and weapons require less power than main propulsion at full drain. They could conceivably have several secondary power sources, each supplying different functions. Inefficient by our standards, but the backup that kind of redundancy provides would be a very nice thing to have.”

The Alliance fleet hung stationary relative to the superbattleship, most of the ships thirty light-seconds distant in a cluster that minimized distances between units as shuttles flew between them bearing spare parts and repair teams. Much closer to the superbattleship, all of the human battleships along with half of the battle cruisers were arrayed around the enemy ship. Even though all of the ships were traveling through space, they appeared motionless to each other.

The fleet’s combat systems and Captain Smythe’s engineers had estimated what the worst-case damage radius might be if one or more power cores on the superbattleship overloaded. Geary had added half again that distance to the total and placed his battleships outside of that, the battle cruisers a little farther off still.

Much more distant, a good ten light-minutes away, the spider-wolf ships had re-formed into a beautifully patterned formation as the aliens watched the human action from a very safe distance. The spider-wolves were certainly respecting their previous agreement that the superbattleship was the property of the humans to dispose of. None of the humans who were “talking” to the spider-wolves had been able to tell what the aliens thought of the human decision to try to capture the bear-cow warship, but the fact that the spider-wolves were watching from so far off was a pretty clear sign that the aliens weren’t interested in taking part or even getting caught in whatever mess the humans had decided to stir up.

“Maybe they are smarter than we are,” Charban had commented.

Rione had been more direct, speaking privately to Geary. “I know you’re aware of what can happen if you send thousands of Marines into that ship.”

“I am painfully aware of the possibilities,” he had answered. “What price would you pay for that planetary defense against space bombardment?”

She had read the anger behind his statement. “There’s something else. What?”

Geary had fixed her eyes with his. “You pretty much confirmed for me that the governments of the Callas Republic and the Rift Federation didn’t want their warships coming home.”

“I never said such a thing.”

“You didn’t say I was wrong when I raised that possibility before this fleet left Varandal. A possibility I came up with because of hints you threw my way. Hints that those governments didn’t trust what those warships might do, fearing they would launch their own coup attempts or act on behalf of a coup attempt by me. I suspect there are plenty of people in the Alliance government who fear this fleet for the same reason and sent it out here in the hopes that it wouldn’t come home. And now I’m thinking about the ships and men and women who won’t be going home, and I’m very, very unhappy that some people back home would be happy to know that.”

It took a long time for her to answer. “I would expect nothing less from you. I never aided any goal of harming this fleet and its crews, regardless of what others may have demanded of me.”

“Tell me who those others are.”

“I can’t because I don’t know for certain! They are smart enough to use cutouts, agents who act for them but whom I can’t tie to anyone. I am sorry, Admiral. I am sorry for those who have died because some of their own leaders don’t trust them. But others do. Do not make the mistake of thinking the Alliance government is working against you. I have told you before that there are many minds trying to control that government. Some are your allies, and many of them want only what is best for the Alliance but differ on what they believe that is.”

Now Geary sat on the bridge of Dauntless, wondering if he was doing the right thing but knowing he had to do it. “Send in the probes.”

Automated probes launched from several of the human ships around the bear-cow warship, approaching their target at a steady, unthreatening pace, each one broadcasting requests to surrender and promises of safety to the bear-cows still aboard their ship. The civilian experts with the help of some of the fleet techs had worked up an animated movie with the same messages, using images in the format used by the Kicks to convey the human offer, and those videos were being sent simultaneously.

The same messages, the same movies, had already been broadcast toward the superbattleship, with no response. Were the surviving members of the crew dead, or were they still refusing to communicate with humans?

Suddenly, particle beam and laser fire licked out from the superbattleship, and within seconds, probe after probe had been blown apart or rendered inactive, all systems dead. “We’ll have to do this the hard way,” Geary said.

“No surprise there,” Desjani replied. She had been grumpy for some time, annoyed that the main effort of reducing the superbattleship’s defenses had been assigned to the human battleships rather than the battle cruisers like Dauntless.

“Captain Armus,” Geary said.

The image of Armus, commanding officer of Colossus, appeared before Geary. Armus was solid, unimaginative, and deliberate to a point just short of being too slow to act. Often that could be a problem. But in this kind of attack, those characteristics were a virtue, so Geary had placed Armus in charge of all of the battleships for the operation.

“My task force is ready,” Armus said.

“Commence your bombardment.”

Armus saluted in the slightly awkward manner of many of the senior officers who had spent most of their time in a fleet where saluting had once been a forgotten ritual, then his image vanished.

All around the helpless superbattleship, Alliance battleships turned bow on and began closing the distance, their shields at maximum and their weapons ready. Dreadnaught, Orion, Superb, and Splendid, all of them with weak shields and extensive damage, had been ordered to hold back until the majority of the bear-cow defenses had been knocked down; but they could still be called on earlier than that if necessary. Even not counting them, against the single superbattleship Geary could deploy nineteen human battleships. As mighty as the Kick warship might be, it was unable to maneuver and seriously outclassed by the firepower steadily drawing closer. He watched, feeling a surge of pride as the battleships headed toward the superbattleship by divisions.

He had led these ships in fights many times, but rarely with the opportunity to watch the slow majesty with which they went into action. Gallant, Indomitable, Glorious, and Magnificent; Dreadnaught bearing extensive recent scars from action, Orion as badly battered as her sister ship, Dependable, and Conqueror; Warspite, Vengeance, Revenge, and Guardian; Fearless, Resolution, and Redoubtable; Colossus, Encroach, Amazon, and Spartan; Relentless, Reprisal, Superb, and Splendid, the last four also scored by damage. Somehow, the wounds borne by the battleships made them seem even more imposing, more threatening, veterans marked by combat who would not let injuries turn them aside.

The superbattleship must have expended all of its missiles in the earlier battle and while fighting off harassing attacks by the spider-wolves. Now it opened fire again with particle beams and laser fire; but the human battleships didn’t return shots yet, letting their bow shields absorb the shots while human sensors pinpointed the precise locations of the weapons on the bear-cow warship. “They’re not concentrating their fire,” Geary remarked. He had worried that shots would be focused on the already-most-hard-hit battleships, but with the Kicks lashing out at every battleship around them, no one human battleship was taking enough hits to cause serious worry.

“No leaders,” Desjani replied. “Their leaders fled the ship, so there’s no one to tell them what to attack. They’re all just picking targets individually.”

Having localized every alien weapon location, Armus gave the order to open fire, and twenty-three battleships opened fire at once with a tremendous barrage of grapeshot and some heavier kinetic projectiles as well since the superbattleship could not maneuver to avoid hits. The grapeshot struck all around the hull of the superbattleship, shields flaring in white-hot intensity as the energy from the solid ball bearings converted to force, battering at the enemy defenses. The alien shields flickered under the blows, weak spots appearing and growing.

The human battleships opened up with their hell lances in a staggered series of volleys that slashed through the remnants of the shields on the superbattleship, then into the armor and every place where weapons had been detected. The bear-cow shields collapsed completely, the superbattleship’s hull itself now glowing with the heat of the hell-lance beams slamming into it.

Amazingly, the surviving Kicks kept firing, pumping out shots from every weapon still working in a frantic attempt to repel the human attack.

“Wow,” Desjani breathed.

“It’s an astounding amount of firepower aimed at one target,” Geary agreed.

“I was thinking of the fact that the target is still there and still fighting in the face of that firepower,” Desjani said. In her voice, there was grudging respect for the enemy standing firm against those odds.

The fire from the superbattleship fell off rapidly, becoming erratic, then finally ceasing as the human assault picked off every weapon almost as fast as it fired. The human barrage continued for another several seconds, then also halted except for a final vindictive volley from Dreadnaught as she, Orion, Superb, and Splendid closed in with the other human battleships.

Captain Armus appeared before Geary again, looking satisfied but not jubilant. Geary suspected that Armus had never worn a jubilant expression. “The external defenses of the alien warship have been reduced,” he reported.

“Very well. Excellent job, Captain Armus. Keep your battleships in position, ready to engage any attempts to fire on the Marine landing force. Take out anything that fires as soon as it opens up.”

Armus nodded in measured approval of his orders, saluted once more, then his image disappeared.

“General Carabali,” Geary ordered, “you may begin your attack.”

The four assault transports broke free from the mass of the fleet, Tsunami and Typhoon approaching one side of the still-slowly-revolving superbattleship and Haboob and Mistral coming in on the opposite side, the transports matching the rotation of the alien warship so that all five ships moved together like partners in a stately dance.

“Why is Carabali splitting her forces?” Desjani asked. “Isn’t that a bad idea when we don’t know much about what’s inside that Kick can?”

“It’s partly because we don’t have deck plans,” Geary explained. “Carabali didn’t want to run into bottlenecks, places where she couldn’t funnel too many Marines through too small an area. By coming in from opposite sides, she helps prevent that from happening.”

General Charban had come onto the bridge unnoticed, taking a break from the ongoing efforts at communication with the spider-wolves. His eyes were shadowed with fatigue as well as emotion and memories as he watched the Marine assault begin. “Isn’t she also complicating the enemy defense by hitting them in more than one place?” Charban asked.

“Yes. That was the other reason.” Geary had wondered whether to let Charban, himself a retired ground-forces officer, look at Carabali’s plan for any problem areas but had decided against that. It wasn’t simply because he needed Charban to remain focused on the struggle to communicate. Marine operations had some significant differences from ground-forces assaults, and Charban wasn’t with the fleet in a military capacity. No good could come of blurring lines of responsibility.

Though, Geary thought, no matter whom else he consulted, responsibility ultimately lay with him.

“You have three thousand Marines with this fleet?” Charban asked. “How many are being utilized in this operation?”

“The first waves will use two thousand,” Geary replied. “A thousand on each side. General Carabali is holding five hundred in reserve, and we’ve got a final five hundred available on the major warships to reinforce the attack if that proves necessary.”

“Two thousand,” Charban repeated. “Against how many alien warriors? We will soon learn the answer to the age-old question of how many bear-cows a single Marine is equal to.”

Geary fought down a laugh, recognizing a ground-forces soldier’s crack at the legendary pride of Fleet Marines, who considered themselves the equal of any number of any other kind of combatant.

Desjani did laugh, turning to smile at Charban. She hadn’t liked him, hadn’t cared for his reluctance to use force when she thought it obviously necessary, but she did like people who could joke in the face of apprehension.

Flocks of landing shuttles burst from the assault transports, lining up and heading for the superbattleship like eagles swooping to a strike.

Here and there, shots from particle beams or lasers suddenly erupted from the battleship, weapons that had ceased fire before being destroyed or which had lain dormant until now, trying to tear up the oncoming ranks of shuttles.

A few shuttles staggered under blows, but the battleships had been watching, and now their own hell-lance batteries opened up again, silencing within seconds the defensive fire in an avalanche of counterfire.

Eight shuttles had taken hits, two seriously damaged, the ranks of shuttles wavering and disrupted by the defensive fire. Geary heard orders going out from the assault coordinators. “Shuttles 1210 and 4236, abort runs and return to base. All other shuttles continue approach.”

Shuttle 1210 replied, her pilot sounding puzzled. “Say again. I didn’t copy.”

“Abort run. Return to base.”

“Sorry. Can’t copy,” the shuttle pilot repeated. “Continuing run.”

“This is 4236,” another voice broke in. “I’ve still got control. Request permission to continue run. It’s safer than trying to push back to base.”

Everyone else had heard 1210 and 4236, and now the other shuttles steadied out, no one wishing to break formation while their more heavily damaged comrades hung on.

Even though the enemy fire had once again ceased, Dreadnaught’s main propulsion units lit off for a moment, pushing the battleship closer to the enemy superbattleship.

Geary activated a special circuit that allowed private communications with any ship’s commanding officer. “Captain Jane Geary, this is Admiral Geary,” he said. “There is nothing else you need to prove to anyone, not after your actions during the battle at this star. Pull back to your assigned position with your comrades.”

He didn’t wait for a reply, ending the message and sitting back.

Desjani made a sidelong glance in his direction. The special circuit had automatically activated a privacy field around Geary’s seat, preventing anyone else from hearing what he had said, and she was surely curious as to what he had told Jane Geary.

Dreadnaught’s bow thrusters fired, countering her forward motion and nudging the battleship back toward her assigned position.

“All right,” Desjani said. “I’ll give in. What did you tell her?”

“I told her that she didn’t need to worry about proving to anyone anymore that she was a Geary.”

“Let’s hope she listens. Admiral, I can keep an eye on the external situation if you want to concentrate on following the Marine attack.”

“I shouldn’t—” As a rule, he shouldn’t concentrate on one area, ignoring what was happening elsewhere. Especially he shouldn’t get down in the weeds of a Marine operation, losing track of events in the space around his ships. But there was no battle under way elsewhere, no other hostile force in this star system. Anyone arriving via a jump point would be at least several light-hours away, and the spider-wolves were far enough off that even they couldn’t stage a surprise attack if they suddenly and inexplicably became hostile.

“You need to learn more about how the Marines operate,” Desjani pointed out. “You are an admiral now. And there’s no better way to learn than by watching them.”

“You’re right,” Geary conceded.

“I’m always right,” she murmured in reply, then in a louder voice that others besides Geary could hear added, “I’ll keep an eye on things while you overwatch the Marine action, Admiral.”

No fleet officer would question that. As much as fleet officers respected the Marines, they also didn’t entirely trust them around ships. The Marines were different, with different training and experience. They would sometimes push buttons they shouldn’t, without knowing what those buttons would do. Everyone would be happy to know that the admiral was watching the Marines.

Of course, Marines felt the same way about sailors, and doubtless wished that General Carabali could supervise the actions of fleet officers.

Geary called up the windows that offered views from Marine combat armor and was surprised at first by the depth of the layers offered this time. But he had never overseen an operation this big, with this many Marines and this many squads, platoons, companies, and battalions to which they were assigned. He could touch a battalion commander’s image and be offered access to the images of the company commanders below that, and below them the platoon commanders, then the squad commanders, and finally individual Marines. He could activate a huge window that contained thumbnails of the views from hundreds of Marines at once in a dizzying range of activity. And, of course, he could talk to General Carabali directly.

He didn’t intend talking to her, distracting her when she needed to be commanding her troops. He didn’t intend talking to any of the Marines and carefully moved his other hand away from the comm controls so he wouldn’t accidentally do so. He needed to know what was happening. He needed to learn more about Marine operations. He didn’t need to micromanage people who knew their jobs far better than he ever would.

A smaller window to one side briefly puzzled Geary, then he realized it offered views from the shuttles rapidly closing in on the hull of the superbattleship. He tapped one, getting a large view of the alien ship, its newly pitted armor looming on all sides as if the shuttle were flying toward a massive, slightly curving wall. Was that a large hatch sealed tight? It looked like a cargo hatch. Nearby was what seemed to be a personnel access, far smaller and not even as big as one intended for humans. Could a Marine in combat armor get through something that size?

The shuttle glided to a halt as its bow thrusters fired, hovering just short of the superbattleship. So close Geary could see the scars of impacts, could spot the place where what had probably been a shield generator had been before it had been blasted to ruin by fire from the battleships.

It all lay silent, as if the superbattleship were lifeless inside as well as out, a derelict crewed only by the dead.

That was possible. The defensive fire they had seen could have been the work of weapons set to fire automatically under control of computerized systems.

Geary didn’t believe that, though. Neither, obviously, did the Marines.

He wondered how it would look, how it would feel, if the superbattleship self-destructed, while he was viewing it virtually from so close-up. The thought put a chill through him, and Geary looked for something to distract him from a possibility that he could do nothing about now.

Spotting thumbnails where activity seemed to be going on, he brought those to the fore, seeing views from the combat armor of Marines actually on the superbattleship’s hull. The tags on the views identified them as combat engineers, and as Geary watched he saw them placing breaching charges to blow open one of the big hatches like the one he had seen earlier.

The view shifted rapidly as the Marines huddled by the hull, then shook as directional charges went off, blowing out portions of the hatch, the shock of the explosions transmitting through the hull to rattle the Marines clinging to it.

The view swayed again dizzily as the combat engineers swung back to the hatch, followed by curses over the comm circuits. “We didn’t get through!” “How thick is this stuff?”

Then came orders from Carabali, sounding in every combat engineer’s battle armor. “Double up the breaching charges.”

The Marine engineers moved quickly, not really needing the “Move it!” encouragement from their squad leaders as they rigged breaching charges in tandem to get through the armor protecting the superbattleship. The delay had thrown off the shuttles, which were clustering near the superbattleship without anyplace to drop off their Marines. Views jumped again as the combat engineers put distance between themselves and the breaching charges. “Fire in the hole!”

How old was that warning, and what had it originally referred to? Geary wondered. Maybe it had once meant someone had physically lit a fuse with an open flame. Now it just warned of an explosion soon to come.

The view shook again, prolonged this time. Marines moved with cries of triumph to holes spearing through the armored hatch. “Five more! Here and here! That’ll break this section free. Go!”

Geary scanned the other windows, seeing similar activity under way at every point where the Marines were trying to blast their way inside the superbattleship. One by one, the breaching teams were creating holes large enough for Marines to pull themselves inside.

He called up a different window, this one showing the view from a Marine who had made it inside a similar cargo-hatch area. There were no lights, just a dark void. “No gravity inside. It’s broke, or they shut it off.” Moving cautiously, the Marine moved to one side as more Marines entered, their infrared-beam lights providing ghostly images of a large compartment that bore some resemblance to that on a human ship. But then, why wouldn’t it? The requirements for moving cargo were the same no matter what creature was doing the job.

“No internal gravity?” Geary heard General Charban comment behind him. “Marines train for that, don’t they?”

“That’s right,” Desjani replied. “They prefer to fight with a gravity field, but they can handle zero g.” She sounded proud of that, that the Marines could deal with something ground forces weren’t trained to handle. Geary had heard her bemoan Marine behavior and mind-sets more than once among fleet officers, but when it came to outsiders like ground forces and aerospace defense, the fleet and the Marines suddenly became brothers and sisters in arms.

The Marines whom Geary had focused on were moving quickly but cautiously to check out the compartment, their heads-up displays highlighting anything that looked unusual or suspicious. In this case, surrounded on the bulkheads and overhead by alien devices of strange design even if they probably fulfilled familiar functions, the heads-ups were keying on almost everything that wasn’t flat bulkhead. In some cases, even seemingly unadorned sections of the walls, overhead, and deck had something about them that made the sensors in the Marine combat armor unhappy.

“Pressure switches?” one of the Marines in the unit Geary was zoomed in on speculated.

“Maybe,” his sergeant replied. “Maybe just cargo-tracking stuff. But maybe not. Keep off ’em.”

“What the hell is this?”

“If you don’t know, don’t touch it! Stop playing tourists and find the air locks and their controls!”

Geary shifted from unit to unit, seeing pretty much the same thing everywhere. Units inside the compartments the combat engineers had breached, moving in zero g as they tried to find all of the hatches leading farther into the enemy ship. “Found one,” a Marine cried. “Are these the controls? They’re set real low, almost on the deck.”

“Duh, brain-dead. These guys are short, remember?”

“Shut up,” their corporal said. “Hey, Sarge, this looks like it. Some sort of knife switch instead of a button, though.”

“Lieutenant?”

“Wait. Okay, Sergeant. The captain says open it up, but be ready for them to be on the other side. Weapons free.”

“Got it. Cover the hatch, you slugs. Flip the switch, Kezar.”

Geary waited, watching, as Corporal Kezar swung the knife switch upward.

And waited.

“Nothing’s happening, Sarge.”

“I can see that. Lieutenant?”

“None of the switches are opening hatches, Sergeant. Get your hacker to work.”

“Cortez! Get that thing open.”

Another Marine huddled by the switch, popping the cover with some difficulty and peering inside. Geary quickly changed views to see what Private Cortez saw, but he couldn’t make out what he was seeing.

The lieutenant’s voice came on again. “What’s the word? Can you override the controls?”

“I can’t even identify the controls!” Private Cortez protested. “This box looks like it oughta be them…”

“Then find the input, find some wires—”

“Lieutenant, there ain’t no input that I can see except this swing switch, and there ain’t no wires in this thing. There’s just some kind of mesh in… what is that gunk? Gel or something.”

“You can’t— What’s—” The lieutenant must also have been viewing what Cortez and Geary were both looking at. “How the hell does that stuff work?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant! All I do know is I can’t hack something that doesn’t work like anything we’ve got!”

Similar conversations were happening in Marine units at every penetration. “Captain, we’re going to have to blow the air locks,” the lieutenant reported after huddling with his sergeant.

“Are the outer hull penetrations blocked?”

“Sir, I don’t know, but we can operate in vacuum fine—”

“Our orders are to take everything inside this ship as intact as possible, and there are a lot of things that don’t handle vacuum as well as our combat armor,” the captain said. “Hold on. Colonel, we need to know if the hull penetrations in this area have been sealed.”

“Yuhas! We need a green light to blow the locks!”

Almost a minute passed as more and more Marines called up the chain of command for approval to blow open pathways into the ship.

“Colonel Yuhas reports his combat engineers say we’re good to go,” the relieved word finally came down the chain of command. “Blow the bulkheads, not the air locks. We don’t know how they’re sealed or locked. That’s from brigade command. Everybody blow your way inside but avoid going straight through air locks. We’re way behind on movement. Get inside that thing.”

“What’s going on?” Desjani asked.

“They’re blowing internal bulkheads now to get inside,” Geary told her.

“That’s why I saw them plugging holes and rigging emergency air locks on the outside of the hull? Have they seen any Kicks yet?”

“No.” He watched a hundred thumbnail views at once as Marines blasted their way through bulkheads and into passageways and other compartments. “Empty.”

Everywhere the Marines were entering, the superbattleship seemed to be vacant of any crew. The Marines moved in rushes down passageways that weren’t as wide or tall as those on human ships but were still large enough to manage a couple of Marines abreast. Smaller cross-corridors intersected the large passageways in what seemed to be a regular enough grid arrangement, similar to those used by humans. As in human ships, conduits holding wiring and ducts carrying air festooned the overhead, offering grips to the Marines as they pulled themselves along, swimming through zero g. As they advanced, the Marines spread out, penetrating deeper into the ship as well as to each side and up and down through the decks.

“Keep your eyes out for control compartments, power core compartments, a bridge, that sort of thing,” a major reminded his unit.

“It all looks the same,” a frustrated captain replied. “There are markings all over the place, but they’re nothing like the markings on our ships or the ones the Syndics use. They could mean anything.”

“No ventilation,” another one of the Marine officers reported. “The air seems okay. Breathable by humans, even though the pressure is lower than we’re comfortable with. But they’ve shut down the ventilation systems.”

“There are supposed to be thousands of ’em aboard this thing,” another Marine muttered, her weapon seeking targets in another empty passageway. “Where the hell are they?”

On the thumbnails spread in front of Geary, bedlam suddenly erupted as Marines in scores of locations suddenly found the answer.