Tenacious

56

A longboat went in first. It headed not for any particular hatch but for one of the vents that had been seared in the side of the station by a reactor’s hot breath.

They expected a lot of death and destruction; still, what they found was a shock even for battle-hardened Marines.

“Damn, there are bodies all over the place,” Gunny Brown reported to them as soon as he and a squad of Marines were inside.

“Was it explosive decompression when the reactors got dumped?” Kris asked.

“The bodies don’t look like they died of that, ma’am,” Gunny reported. “I got a forensic team right behind me. The sergeant heading it up thinks they were dead before space got to them.”

“Any idea what killed them?”

“There’s a lot of paper cups floating around here. Droplets of liquid. They captured some of it and they’re doing a field analysis. Give us a minute or two, Admiral.”

Kris settled back into her chair in flag plot, tightened her belt, and prepared to wait. The Wasp had gone to Condition Charlie after tossing a few large chunks of rubble over the horizon of the station at the derelict warship.

It hadn’t reacted to any of them.

The Royal was headed this way with a couple of good-size rocks and ice hunks from the giant’s ring. Next orbit, they’d see if there was any fight left in the wreck.

Show it or smash it.

Kris no longer cared which.

She was starting to develop a very negative attitude toward her enemy.

“We got the results from those droplets and the cups. There was some kind of alcoholic drink in them. Alcohol and cyanide, we think.”

Kris turned to where Amanda and Jacques sat at her conference table. Amanda was rapidly going pale. Beside her, Penny’s mouth was falling open.

It was Jacques, the anthropologist, who gave voice to what the others were struggling to get their minds around. “They poisoned themselves on their communion wine,” he said.

On the huge base ship they’d shot up, they’d discovered a memorial garden where the ashes of the dead were scattered. There they grew a grain and a fruit that seemed readily converted to alcohol. Bread and Wine.

Sacraments, they’d concluded at the time.

Now, with their chances to continue the fight slim and the option of surrender seemingly the only one any rational person would consider, the enemy had taken their own lives with their sacrament.

“Again, the aliens have chosen death before surrender,” Kris muttered to herself. Or maybe she spoke aloud.

“But to make mass suicide a religious experience. Dear God,” was, no doubt, truly intended as a prayer from Penny.

“My general tells me to tell you that we had a nation very much like that among us not all that long ago,” Zarra said from the corner where the feline observers sat.

“What became of them?” Kris asked.

“They learned different. That life is more important than a hollow death,” Zarra answered without consulting her officers. Then she had to turn and tell them what she’d said.

“They agree with what I said,” she quickly added.

“We have had groups like that also,” Jacques said. “They have also learned differently. These aliens we fight are slow learners.”

“The general says maybe they are not meant to learn. Only to die.”

“I wouldn’t mind that so much,” Kris said, and was surprised by the words as they came out of her mouth, “but they take a lot of good Sailors and Marines with them.”

“My admiral says that is always sad.”

“Yes,” Kris agreed, dryly.

“What are we going to do?” Penny asked.

“Find out who’s still alive in the aft section,” Kris said, and tapped her commlink. “Jack, have you been following this?”

“Loud and painfully clear,” he reported.

“You about to go in?”

“The pinnace is clamped onto the hull a good hundred meters short of the end. We’re about to cut our way into it.”

“Jack, be careful,” Kris said.

“Wife, I always am.”

Kris took a deep breath and gave the order. “Marines, land the landing force.”