Incursion Page 3

  As induction sessions went, they’d all had better.

  “Permission to speak, sir?” said the new woman.

  She looked like she’d rather rescue a cat from a tree than shoot the enemy, but Ten knew better than to judge a book by its cover. If she was in the same room as him, same as Double-D, they were highly-trained and effective killers. They probably had a few other hobbies too, like DD with his bag of tech.

  Staines glared at her, then nodded.

  “With respect, sir, the team was incomplete. We can do better.”

  “I hope you’re right, Trooper Kearney, because this is a problem we can do without. We’re still fighting the war with the Deathless, and we’re seriously stretched. We don’t have the time or the resources for an extended battle on a second front.”

  Ten screwed up his face as he looked towards Davies.

  “Marine X, you’re a hair’s breadth away from being sent back to the front line!” Staines barked. Even in his virtual form, he still had a great military presence.

  “I’m at your disposal, sir,” said Ten, pitching his tone just the safe side of openly insolent.

  “Yes, you bloody well are,” snapped Staines, “and you’d better start acting like it.”

  If the admiral was appearing as an avatar rather than in person, he must have been light-years away. That meant Sol had actually put vital resources into creating this shitty briefing room, wherever it was. It was not money well spent.

  Ten put on his serious face. Staines had picked him for this mission, and he wanted to be involved. Further down the command chain, they cut him the slack to play out occasionally, but the admiral and the parade of medals on either side of him knew him only as Penal Marine X.

  And they’d chosen him anyway, in spite of failing two back-to-back simulations. Either times were tough, they were up shit creek without a paddle, or – even worse – both of those things. Staines glared at him for a moment before continuing with the briefing.

  “We’ve assembled this team at short notice for a highly classified mission. Marine X, you’re seconded to Charlie Team SBS as a temporary replacement for Sergeant Gallagher. You'll be joining Charlie Team.”

  “What happened to Gallagher?” Ten asked.

  A frosty chill descended on the room.

  “Drop it,” Davies whispered to Ten, “touchy subject.”

  He could tell he’d entered delicate territory, but Staines ignored the interruption.

  “You’ve been assigned a light patrol craft, Solux IX, to take you from this outpost to the staging point on Kingdom 10. There you’ll receive your mission briefing and meet the final member of your team.”

  “Who’s that going to be?” said Ten. Sometimes it was hard to keep his mouth shut.

  “That’s compartmentalised and even I don't know, but you'll obviously be told when you meet them. You’ll receive your formal briefing from Admiral Stansfield.”

  There was a palpable ripple through the room. Stansfield was a name connected with military royalty. They’d all heard the stories and legends in basic training, but he’d been dead – or assumed to be dead – for a hundred and sixteen years. Maybe this was some relative? Ten frowned but kept his thoughts to himself; they’d find out soon enough.

  “Needless to say, four of you know the high personal stakes with this mission. I don’t need to remind you. Marine X, you are in a very privileged position; it’s why we allowed you to experience real pain in the simulations. You need to remember that not everyone gets to return.”

  “How do we get to our final destination, sir?” Davies asked. He looked around as he said it, like he was asking for the rest of the room.

  There was a pause. Staines looked like he was considering his words. “Conway will fly you out.”

  There was an uncomfortable shuffling from amongst the team. Ten looked at Conway, but her face gave nothing away.

  “You need to get back on the horse after the loss of Gallagher,” Staines said, an air of sympathy in his voice for the first time. “You’re a most accomplished pilot, Corporal, but sometimes things go wrong, as you all know.”

  Marine X made a badly-timed attempt to loosen up the atmosphere. “Better hope we’re luckier than Gallagher, eh?”

  He’d barely finished the sentence when her fist came crashing across his chin with a force so hard it knocked him to his knees.

  “Bastard!” she shouted.

  Davies, Mason and Kearney turned in horror to the avatar of Admiral Staines. The virtual entourage surrounding him seemed equally aghast, looking to the admiral for a cue on how to respond to what had just happened.

  “I’m sorry, we received some signal interference there,” Staines began. “You broke up for a moment. You appear to have a nosebleed, Marine X. Get that looked at before you fly out.”

  Ten picked himself up from the floor and got back on his feet, feeling his nose to see if it had been broken.

  “We’re relying on you all, Charlie Team. I won’t pretend this isn’t a perilous mission, but I know you’re up to the job. Good luck!”

  As the admiral’s avatar turned away, Ten caught the tail-end of his last words. She can have that one on me. I’ve wanted to punch that Marine myself on many an occasion.

  “Too soon for a joke,” muttered Ten in a rare moment of humility. He’d judged it wrong, come in too fast and too strong. These guys were a team, he was the outsider. It wasn’t like a front-line Marine company where they worked with a large number of colleagues.

  The Special Boat Service worked almost exclusively in small patrols of maybe half a dozen. They rarely fought at platoon strength. This was a tight team, and it seemed they'd somehow suffered a permanent loss, which was almost unheard of these days. He needed to give these kids time to adjust to his presence.

  And if Conway drove a space shuttle half as well as she threw a punch, they were all in capable hands.

  “Any idea who the sixth member of the team will be?” Davies asked. “We usually operate as five, I can see why Ten is here, but a sixth?”

  “Don’t look at me,” Conway replied, rubbing her hand. Ten felt like she was made from concrete, but he deserved it even if she now had the swelling to prove it.

  “So what do we know about our mission? And is that one of the Stansfields, do you think?” Kearney was speaking to the rest of the group for the first time. She was clearly at ease with these people.

  “There’s something serious going on in the Eagle Nebula,” Conway replied. “Top secret, as Staines said, super classified. I know they’re pissed off. They could do without it, what with the Deathless and all that. I take it that’s where you’ve come from, Ten?”

  He took his chance to do some bonding. It wasn’t really his style, but he knew well how teams like this had to work. He’d suggest a group hug if it would help to thaw things with Conway.

  “Yeah, front-line. Bit of a shitstorm. It’s a long time since I’ve been cloned this far out in space.”

  “Hell, man, you’re cloned?” Mason jumped in.

  They all looked at him.

  “Guess who just got lucky! It’s curtains for us if we take a hit, we don’t get to clone it out in this battle.”

  4

  Staines was right to place his trust in Conway as a pilot. She handled the patrol craft with confidence and a sure hand. As Solux IX sat in the launch bay, Ten watched the stars on one of its displays and considered how much he missed by having his mind deployed through wormholes into a cloned body. It was a great way to dispatch Marines across the light-years, faster than a ship could get them there, but there was no time to take in the scenery.

  And what spectacular scenery it was.

  “Cleared for launch, Solux IX,” said Control.

  “Roger, launching now,” said Conway, triggering the manoeuvring thrusters as the bay doors opened. The patrol craft was a small, sleek vehicle built for short-range missions. With space for a crew of twelve, it felt spacious with only the five of them on boa
rd.

  Conway nudged the ship away from the outpost – Ten realised he hadn’t even found out what it was called during their short time on the station – and set a course that would take them to a safe distance for the move to hyperspace.

  “Manoeuvring thrusters for fifteen seconds,” she reported, “then main engines at full power for sixty seconds. Hyperspace drive engagement in six hundred seconds. Buckle up, people.”

  “Nice ship, right?” said Double-D as he worked through the scanners, familiarising himself with Solux IX's tech.

  “Maybe,” said Ten doubtfully, “when it’s finished.” He nodded at the gaping holes in the instrument and control panels, where some subsystems hadn’t yet been installed. Solux IX wasn’t new, and it looked like its refit wasn’t even complete.

  “It’s a bit pokey,” said Ten, frowning at the tightly packed command room where the team had congregated.

  “You probably only travel on really big ships, right?” sneered Mason. “Solux IX isn’t good enough for Mr Big Shot. What do you want, Dreadnought?” He barked a laugh, but Ten wasn’t amused. Dreadnought’s reactivation wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge.

  “What have you heard about Dreadnought, Mason?” he asked with a tone of quiet menace.

  “Heard? Why would I have heard anything about that old relic? It was a joke, fuckwit. Get over yourself.”

  Ten settled back into his chair, unconvinced, and triggered his HUD to read the background material to their mission.

  Kingdom 10 was an orbital space station, a former naval outpost so old it had been decommissioned decades before and turned over to a government-sponsored scientific mission. It was a throwback to the earliest days of Sol’s exploration, a relic from an ancient age.

  Much like me, thought Ten with a snort.

  But Kingdom 10 was holding up well, all things considered. The Mark 3 stations had been built at what were then the furthest reaches of explored space, and they were now merely staging posts, manned by skeleton crews of civilian scientists and technical personnel who were happy to be all but abandoned in the middle of nowhere.

  Everything had changed when the Deathless had invaded New Bristol. Kingdom 10 was no longer a holiday camp for anti-social civilians, and their peaceful existence had been disrupted by the arrival of a Royal Navy supply vessel laden with personnel, updated equipment and a plethora of new orders. Unusually for these isolated outposts, it now had a substantial military presence, and a hasty refit was underway to bring the structure in line with present-day military requirements.

  “So why aren’t they just sending clones out here to deal with this thing?” Ten asked Davies a few hours later as Solux IX slipped through hyperspace. They were in the ship’s small mess, bonding over the shared horror of an indescribable microwave meal.

  “Good question,” said Davies with a bitter laugh. “We’re all stuck in our original bodies because we were on our way to help establish a permanent military presence in one of the newer colonies. A sort of semi-retirement, a break after years of service. We weren’t supposed to deploy to active service, but as you can see, in wartime there are no guarantees on that one.”

  “Okay,” said Ten slowly, “makes sense, I guess, but why not switch to clones? You’re backed up, right?”

  “We are, but with a forty-eight-hour delay. No fucking clue why. Some mix-up somewhere, they said. No time to fix it or download to clones before we shipped out, apparently. We went straight into training, then briefing, then shipping out here.”

  “Briefing says Kingdom 10 doesn’t have cloning bays,” said Ten.

  “Or a decent wormhole communicator, if you can believe it. Low-bandwidth, audio and low-res video only. We’re right out in the sticks, totally on our own.”

  “So if somebody dies…?”

  “Yeah. If you die, you’re fucked until someone walks your backup to a cloning facility several light-years away,” said Davies.

  Ten frowned and poked at his meal. “So you’re stuck in these bodies till this is done?”

  “Looks that way,” said Davies bitterly. “At least you’ve got a proper RMSC clone, I’m in Human 1.0.”

  They finished their meals in silence.

  “Why does Conway fly if she started as a Marine?” asked Ten as they headed back to the command room. “She seems to know how to handle this thing.”

  “Yeah, she wasn’t always a Marine, let’s just put it that way. Sometimes they need troopers who have a particular set of skills, right? I take it that’s why you’re here?”

  “Probably,” Ten murmured. “Though on my CV I would just list my special skills as killing things and breaking stuff.”

  Davies seemed to find that funny, but when was the last time Ten had needed a CV? He couldn’t remember. His personnel files were so heavily restricted that not even Admiral Staines had access to the full details.

  “Dropping out of hyperspace in sixty seconds,” announced Conway as Davies and Ten took their seats in the command room. “Then it’s a nice easy run to Kingdom 10.”

  “And another bloody briefing,” moaned Mason. “Why didn’t they just give it to us all at once?”

  “Quit whining,” said Kearney. “You’re getting paid, aren’t you?”

  “Ha,” said Ten, shaking his head. As a Penal Marine, he wasn’t due to be paid for his services until his sentence was complete.

  “Ah, right, you don’t get shit, do you?” sneered Mason. “What did you do, in any case?”

  They all turned to look at Marine X, not bothering to disguise their interest in the story of how he’d lost his name and ended up in the penal system.

  “It’s a long story,” said Ten quietly, “and I’m not telling it now.”

  “Aw, come on,” said Kearney, “we need to know who we’re working with if we’re going to trust you.”

  Ten looked at them all, then shook his head.

  “Probably disobeyed an order,” said Mason dismissively, turning away and picking up his data slate. “Or failed too many missions.”

  Ten said nothing.

  Then Solux IX dropped out of hyperspace, and the plan fell apart.

  “Mayday, mayday,” squawked the comms system. “This is Kingdom 10. We are in urgent need of assistance. Please respond.”

  For a moment, the crew were silent. Then Kearney barked, and everyone moved at once.

  Davies checked the comms system. “Looks like a genuine signal,” he said. “They have the right security tags, and their broadcast has been authenticated by our system. Radio comms only, so it’s purely a local call.”

  “No wormhole generator,” said Ten. “We might be the only people to hear their call for months.”

  “I guess we’d better take a closer look,” said Kearney, “and open a channel, see if we can get a little more detail.”

  Conway acknowledged the order. “Ten thousand klicks to Kingdom 10, firing engines at full power, sixty-second burn.”

  There was a roar from the rear of the ship, and it kicked forward, pressing the crew into their seats.

  “Mason, find out what the hell’s going on.”

  “Working on it,” said Mason, all professional now that he had something to do. He tapped and swiped at his data slate, interfacing with the ship’s sensors.

  “Comms open,” said Davies.

  “Kingdom 10, this is the light patrol craft Solux IX. We are on course to dock with you in” – she paused to check the main display as the nav-computer updated their flight plan – “about thirty-five minutes.”

  “Solux IX, good to hear your voice.” The man sounded stressed and afraid, but relieved to have someone to talk to.

  “What’s the nature of your problem, Kingdom 10?”

  “We have a collision impact warning,” said the voice of Kingdom 10. “High likelihood of major structural damage in ten minutes, medium risk of total destruction of the station. Anything you could do to help…”

  Kearney muted the audio as a data package arrived.
She opened it and flicked the contents across to the main display. It showed Kingdom 10’s location in orbit around a large Earth-like planet, and the path of the objects that threatened to destroy the station.

  “Shit,” muttered Conway, “not good.”

  “Kingdom 10,” said Kearney reopening the audio, “we’re a long way off. Can you evacuate to the planet’s surface?”

  “Negative, Solux IX, we have three hundred people and only a ship-to-ship transport shuttle.”

  “Understood. We’re working on it.” She muted the audio again. “Mason, what’s the situation?”

  “Looks like a cloud of debris heading toward the station. Mostly small stuff, but there’s a couple of larger pieces that could do a lot of damage.”

  “What the hell do we do about this?” said Kearney quietly.

  “Delete the logs and head home? Tell everyone we arrived too late to help?” offered Mason.

  “Three hundred people,” said Ten into the sudden quiet of the command room.

  “They’ll be backed up,” pointed out Mason, “and what can we do anyway?”

  “We can try,” said Kearney, and there was steel in her voice. “Conway, can you give us a flightpath that presents a firing solution on the largest pieces of debris? We can knock them clear or grind them into smaller pieces.”

  “Ballsy,” said Conway with a frown. “I’ll have a look, but it’s not going to be pretty.”

  “DD, get our weapons systems online.”

  “Already on it. We have self-guided missiles and manually targeted railguns.”

  “Manually targeted?” asked Ten, incredulous.

  “Weapons computer hasn’t been fitted yet,” said Davies, nodding at a hole in the wall. “It’s in the hold if you’re interested.”

  “No time,” said Conway. “Plug yourselves in and get ready for action.”

  “Standing by,” said Davies. Ten grunted his readiness.

  There was a sudden and forceful collision that shook their vessel.

  “Belt up, everybody!” said Conway. “Looks like we’ve found the edge of Mason’s cloud of debris. I hope you cleaned your teeth and are ready for action, guys!”