The Xenocide Mission Read online

  Nine

  Day Fifteen: 17 June 2153

  Sixty marines tramped round and round Pathfinder’s hangar deck at a slow jog. At a shout from their captain they broke into a fast charge. Then the artificial gravity cut out.

  Michael Gilmore gripped the rail of the observation gallery and watched sixty bodies and 240 flailing arms and legs react to the loss of gravity. Those who got it right kept their heads and managed to stay on the floor, held in place by their gripsoles. Those who got it partially right lost contact with the floor but managed to airswim to another surface – floor or ceiling – to latch on there. Those who got it wrong were left flying through the air, occasionally colliding with each other to the sound of swearing.

  Artgrav came back on, slowly, to give those who were now fifteen or twenty feet up in the air a chance of coming down without broken bones. They landed with a not very gentle bump.

  ‘That was pathetic!’ Bill Perry strode into the middle of the bay and glared around him, hands on hips. His face was flushed from the exercise and his T-shirt was stained with sweat. ‘Maybe we didn’t make it clear to you that you are space marines! And space marines are just as good in freefall as they are on terra firma. And it’s quite possible that SkySpy is still without power, and that means if we have to fight our way in, we’ll be doing it in micro-gee and you useless bunch of tossers will be cut to pieces by the enemy.’

  Gilmore had watched their manoeuvre as they boarded Pathfinder , from a distance, and thought it was pretty obvious that they weren’t a useless bunch of tossers. Why did so much of standard military practice seem to consist of belittling people’s proven abilities?

  Someone muttered something that Gilmore didn’t hear but Perry obviously did. He spun round on the miscreant. ‘Yes, Private Jarnegan, you’ll be in space armour and you’ll be able to use its thrusters, but to use them properly you have to have a feel for what freefall is like in the first place, and so far I’m not seeing much evidence of that. Lieutenant McCallum!’

  ‘Sir!’ Perry’s opposite number in Charlie Platoon drew herself up.

  ‘Get your platoon fallen in. Sergeant Cale, Able Platoon will fall in. And we’re going to do it again, until we all get it right . . .’

  ‘He asked if we could stop off in the Outer Belt to practise attacking an asteroid,’ someone said behind Gilmore. He looked round when he heard the Georgia drawl; he hadn’t heard Pathfinder’s captain come up behind him. Andrew McLaughlin leaned against the rail next to him and watched the scene below. ‘I had to disoblige him,’ McLaughlin added.

  One corner of Gilmore’s mouth twitched; it wasn’t much but it was the nearest he had come to a smile for a long time. His mind ran on two tracks: either/or. Either worry about Joel, or entertain the old feeling of helplessness, that there was nothing he could do, that he had bitten off more than he could chew . . .

  A whistle from below, and the marines started their slog around the bay again.

  ‘They keep going,’ he said. ‘I’ll say that for them.’

  ‘You were always against having marines in the Navy, weren’t you?’

  ‘Couldn’t see the need for them,’ Gilmore agreed. Ships attack ships – who needs hand-to-hand combat in this day and age? ‘Feel free to keep reminding me I was wrong.’

  They watched the marines for a moment longer.

  ‘How are you getting on with your fellow observers?’ McLaughlin asked. Gilmore grunted.

  ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘You’ve got a group of men and women who know nothing about spaceships . . .’

  ‘Exactly, and so they’re happy to stay in their cabins and talk each other into states of advanced paranoia, and not even try to run my ship for me, which suits me just fine. Apart from the guided tour, you’re the first to make it this far for’ard.’

  Gilmore smiled, a bit more widely. ‘Just making sure the ship’s being run properly.’

  McLaughlin chuckled. ‘On the other hand, I have to involve them with anything concerning SkySpy. Maybe you could take them a message? We’ll be ready to step through to the lifeboat in half an hour. We’ll pick it up, interview the crew and get a fuller picture of what happened.’

  Finally! Gilmore thought. To step-through to the quarantine system, they had to be at right angles to the Roving’s sun and at a point of equal gravitational potential with their destination. Once in position, they could travel light years in an instant, but to get to the starting point in the first place had taken nearly a week.

  ‘I’ll pass the word,’ he said.

  Another silence.

  ‘Mike . . .’

  ‘Andy . . .?’

  McLaughlin looked as if he were swallowing a pill. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Mike, but . . . you’re a civilian observer, naturally I extend you every courtesy but . . .’

  ‘I have nothing to do with the way you run this ship or this mission,’ Gilmore said. ‘I understand, Andy, don’t worry.’

  ‘It’s more than that, Mike. I have to treat you like one of the others and there may be areas I just can’t let you in. Do you know, I’ve got sealed orders?’

  ‘You’ve got what?’ Gilmore said in disbelief. The Commonwealth Navy was run openly; he had always made sure of that.

  ‘John Chase gave me sealed orders, to be opened once we’ve picked up the lifeboat. I understand they contain various options for how to proceed, based upon what we actually learn. And they’re specifically labelled, eyes commanding officers and Captain Perry only.’

  ‘Ach.’ Gilmore made a noise in the back of his throat. John Chase was First Admiral and if he wanted to play Hornblower, that was his privilege. ‘How bad can it be? I know what this ship can do, I’ve got a reasonable idea of what the marines can do . . . you’re not going to surprise me.’

  ‘Sure.’ McLaughlin looked relieved. ‘Thanks, Mike.’

  ‘God, they’re a shower. Half of them are just in it for the kicks.’ Donna looked up from rubbing her face with a towel when Bill Perry spoke; she assumed correctly that he was addressing her. ‘They wanted to get out into space, the marines seemed a nice short cut. An interim step for those who can’t get into the Commonwealth all in one go.’

  ‘They’ll do their job, Bill,’ she said, and went back to rubbing. ‘They’ve all been through selection. We didn’t just take anyone.’ Besides, Perry’s summary of why half his marines had joined up quite closely matched her own motives.

  ‘Don’t bet on it. Private Jarnegan, master of over-reliance on space armour? I asked the man why he joined up. “To kill aliens, suh!” He thought it was what I wanted to hear. And look at them!’ Now he was glaring up at the gallery. ‘Thick as thieves.’

  She followed his gaze and saw the captain and the ex-commodore, side by side.

  ‘Are you surprised, Bill?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ he said. ‘These Navy types stick together, I understand that. Though why anyone can stomach that man Gilmore . . .’

  ‘You’ve got a problem with him, haven’t you?’ Perry looked aslant at her. ‘Donna, the man sold out the UK.’

  ‘Oh, Bill . . .’

  ‘I’ve heard it from the king himself, Donna. During the Roving Mission he totally screwed up our chances of—’

  ‘Bill, he made sure the Rusties stayed free. Why is that bad? The king and a bunch of fascists were all set to replace the Ones Who Command in their entirety, and they were not nice people.’

  ‘He . . .’

  ‘And he could have persuaded Arm Wild to throw us out altogether; but no, he let the UK stay in orbit and be the port of entry for the Roving, and as a result we’ve grown rich enough to start a marine corps from nothing. Do you have a problem with that?’

  Perry grabbed his own towel and pummelled his head with it. ‘You know his problem? He’s an idealist and he does what he thinks is right, bugger what’s best for everyone else.’

  ‘He . . .’

  ‘He’s not a friend of the UK, Donna. He stayed with us for exactly as
long as it suited him, he took everything the UK gave him, then he moved on. And because he’s the precious commodore, McLaughlin’s eating out of his hand.’

  Donna let him have it. ‘You should study your history, Bill.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Perry looked at her suspiciously.

  ‘I mean that on the Roving Mission, McLaughlin was captain of the American ship. He was stuck on the surface during the orbit battle, and Gilmore had to take command of the allied ships and fight off the baddies. So excuse our captain if he’s got a soft spot for the guy.’

  ‘Oh, bloody hell!’

  ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘Yeah, well . . . I knew the captain was on the mission and I knew Gilmore was in the fight . . . I didn’t put two and two together.’ Perry’s clamped jaw suggested it was the last time he would make that mistake. ‘It just means that if I need the captain’s help, I’m going to have work twice as hard to get it.’

  ‘He’s not Gilmore’s lap dog, Bill. He’ll do what’s right,’ Donna said. But Perry just grunted in answer.

  The diplomatic observers were berthed in a cluster of cabins around a central common area, well aft, on the last inhabited deck before the power levels. The idea was that when Pathfinder was exploring, its complement of scientists could be closeted out of the way of the crew and be safely scientific to their hearts’ content. The observers had been told they were in a special apartment reserved for special passengers, and they probably believed it. Gilmore knew full well that it was generally referred to by the crew as the granny annex.

  The atmosphere as he ducked through the hatch was tense and bored. Some of the observers were seated at the central table, ostensibly working on their aides, but the general set of their faces and the silence suggested that maybe they were beginning to wonder if this trip was a good idea.

  Oh, it had seemed like one; their masters, the ambassadors to the Roving, had jumped at the chance to embarrass their good friends the Commonwealth. Squeezing observers onto Pathfinder had been the obvious step, just because they could. But the observers themselves were all too aware that they were civilians who were possibly headed into a war zone. They had seen the reports on the XCs. And there wasn’t much they could do about it, or to pass the time in the meantime.

  They listened while Gilmore delivered his message.

  ‘The captain couldn’t tell us himself?’ Toshio Shintani, the observer for the Pacifican government, grumbled.

  ‘Of course not.’ Rhukaya Bakan smiled, first at him and then at Gilmore. She was observer for the Confederation of South East Asia. ‘He’s got better things to do than waste time on us. Thank you, Mr Gilmore. Coffee?’ She was sitting nearest to the drinks dispenser.

  ‘Thanks.’ Gilmore pulled up a chair and sat down.

  ‘And of course,’ she said as she handed the cup over, ‘we all have a duty to keep busy writing up-to-the -minute reports for our governments, whereas Mr Gilmore’s government can get its information just as well from the captain when he returns. So that leaves him at liberty to wander about in the ship and wish he was still a captain himself. Is that an accurate assessment, Mr Gilmore?’

  ‘It passes the time,’ Gilmore agreed. It also spared him from going stir crazy. He saw that Bakan was still smiling but there was sympathy in her eyes.

  ‘I hesitate to put myself in your shoes or to say anything so facile as “I know how you feel”,’ she said, ‘but I have been in a similar situation. I’ve been cut off from loved ones by war, and . . . it’s the not knowing, isn’t it? If the worst came to the worst then that would be terrible but at least you’d have something to make your peace with in due course. But this way . . .’

  ‘Exactly,’ Gilmore said gratefully. ‘You don’t know, and you dread finding out.’

  ‘It happened with me during the Rangoon Insurrection,’ she said. ‘My brothers were the other side of the fighting line, all communications were down and then the city was bombed.’ Rangoon had infamously been destroyed by a nuclear blast. ‘A horrible thing. It had been threatened but no-one thought it would be done. Thousands killed. Were my brothers among them? I just didn’t know.’ There was a faraway look in her eyes that told of the anguish of that time.

  Gilmore’s cup stopped on the way to his mouth. It had been the Confederation, her employer, that had nuked Rangoon, in an entirely dog-in-the-manger act when it became obvious that they had lost the city. Whose side was she on?

  ‘And you work for . . .?’ he said.

  The faraway look was replaced with patient condescension, as if he had asked a very stupid question. And maybe it had been stupid, or at the very best out of place, but he wanted to know.

  ‘Rangoon was destroyed by the extremists,’ she said. ‘You have to remember that the extremists were totally discredited by what happened on the Roving Mission.’ Gilmore remembered: his small part in that was one of the triumphs of his life. ‘The moderates are well and truly back in power. I made my peace with the Confederation years ago; my parents were Indian and Indonesian and I was born in Burma, and that mixture of races and cultures was only possible because of the Confederation. I made the Confederation my country because I could see it was the only way ahead for Asia, and now I’m proud to serve it and help it recover from the effects of madmen like Krishnamurthy. Surely you can understand that?’

  ‘I can understand,’ Gilmore said mildly. R. V. Krishnamurthy had made his own unique impact on the Roving Mission, but that was all in the past and Gilmore firmly believed in letting the past lie. ‘And yes, you can understand what it’s like for me. Thanks for letting me know.’ He lifted his coffee cup up in a silent toast, and Bakan returned it.

  Four years ago he had been on Ark Royal and staring down the torpedo tubes of the Confederation ship, Shivaji , while two of his crew were incarcerated by the Confederation on the Roving below and two more faced possible execution on Shivaji itself. And now he was sharing a drink with a Confederation official, and finding her quite attractive and pleasant. He hoped his old crew would understand. Or maybe he would play safe and just not mention it to them the next time he saw them.

  Pathfinder stepped through to within half a light minute of SkySpy’s Lifeboat B – an impressive piece of navigation and guesswork as to the lifeboat’s precise position. The cries of joy over the radio as Pathfinder closed the gap suggested that the survivors of SkySpy were glad to see them. It didn’t last.

  ‘You’re not taking us back to the Roving?’ Lifeboat pilot Albarazi looked around the wardroom as if trying to find sympathy on one of the faces: McLaughlin, Bill Perry, Donna McCallum and Sand Strong, senior of the First Breed on Pathfinder. The decision-makers for the SkySpy mission. Around the edges of the room stood Gilmore and the rest of the observers. Some were taking notes, many were leaning forward to catch every word. Gilmore tried to keep his own face impassive. ‘We hoped . . .’

  ‘No, son, we’re off to SkySpy,’ McLaughlin said.

  ‘We’ve been on board for days.’

  ‘Son, you’re almost at the generator anyway. And we have to find out—’

  ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ Albarazi sounded desperate. ‘The XCs showed us no mercy. They tunnelled in, BEN JEAPES thousands of them, and . . . they’re animals, sir!’ He leaned forward. ‘Trust me, sir. Everyone left behind is dead. Everyone. They won’t have—’

  Gilmore spoke for the first time. ‘The report you beamed ahead said Lieutenant Gilmore and—’ he checked his aide – ‘Boon Round of the First Breed got off the lifeboat and re-entered SkySpy.’ McLaughlin shot him an annoyed look but kept quiet.

  ‘Well, trust me, they’re dead too,’ Albarazi said. Gilmore hadn’t been introduced and it seemed Albarazi didn’t recognize him. ‘The XCs won’t have spared them, bloody idiots.’

  Gilmore raged. ‘Did you see them die?’ he shouted.

  ‘Um, no, sir . . .’

  ‘Then we’ll make our own minds up,’ McLaughlin said, with a warning glance at Gilmore. Gilmore subsided
in a fit of trembling that he fought to control.

  ‘Why did they get off?’ Donna McCallum spoke up.

  ‘To make sure the banks had been destroyed.’ Albarazi sounded surprised she should ask.

  ‘Wouldn’t you say that was the right thing to do?’ She was presumably speaking to Albarazi but Gilmore could have sworn she glanced at Perry.

  ‘Well, technically . . .’

  ‘Mr Albarazi,’ McLaughlin said, breaking into a rising level of tension, ‘I’ll want a full copy of the lifeboat’s log and your personal report.’

  ‘You’ve already got them, sir. Nothing’s changed since I beamed the first report through to the Roving.’

  ‘Better and better. What’s your supply situation?’

  ‘Supplies? No problem,’ Albarazi said.

  ‘Damage?’

  ‘We took some hits but we’ve patched them up.’

  ‘Is there anything to stop you getting safely back home as you are?’

  Albarazi finally took the hint that the crew of the lifeboat weren’t about to transfer to Pathfinder.

  ‘No, sir,’ he said sullenly.

  ‘Then that’s dandy. Our people will check you over but then you’re on your own again till you get home. Captain Perry, do you require any further information?’

  Perry looked up from the notes he was making on his aide. ‘I’d appreciate a look at the log and the report, sir, but no further questions here.’

  ‘Fine. Mr Albarazi will be escorted back to the lifeboat and we’ll open our sealed orders.’ McLaughlin looked apologetically around at the observers, but spoke in the general direction of Gilmore. ‘And we’ll be doing that on our own.’

  ‘Commodore?’

  Gilmore stopped in the passageway and looked around. ‘That’s Mr Gilmore,’ he said, ‘as your superior likes to point out. Um –’ well, he thought, while she’s here – ‘that point you made about my son . . . thank you.’

  Donna McCallum looked abashed. ‘I just thought it needed saying,’ she said. ‘I’d be proud of him.’