And All The Stars A Grave. Read online

  Daryl wanted to stand and stare, to ask a million questions, or simply to have a nervous breakdown, but he knew he had no time for any of those things. Not when more of the blue green blobs were streaking towards them every second.

  “And with trouble? What’s the biggest, heaviest thing you can push?”

  “One point six billion tons. A sphere with a radius of thirteen hundred metres.” Which was staggeringly big. A mountain in space. And exactly what they needed. And as he performed the calculations in his head as best he could, reasonably dense.

  “Good. I suggest we get the hell out of here, repair the damage, and find the biggest nastiest asteroid we can find and push, amongst the sixth and seventh planetary fields, preferably one with a solid iron core, pick it up and then throw it at that thing from a safe distance.” The one thing he could be reasonably sure of was that the satellite wouldn’t move far, not when it was in geo-stationary orbit above their target. It was a sitting duck. But if it did move, they could always change their attack accordingly.

  “Won’t it just blow the asteroid up?”

  “Of course it will. That’s what I’m counting on. Even if the satellite destroys it, it’s surely got to use up a lot of power or mass doing it. Especially if it has to blow the whole thing to dust. A rock has no fuel tanks or weapons banks to help it self-destruct. And with a heavy iron core it’ll be that much tougher to destroy. So it has to assume that even a tiny fragment of one should be able to destroy it and fire accordingly. A second or a third should surely get it even if the first fails, and meanwhile we can lick our wounds in relative safety.”

  “Or we could use it as a shield, and then blow the thing apart from short range.” The human officer was only translating the words of one of the others he realised. His translator was working. His Force translator. Daryl stared at the little alien unit, plugged into his ear, so much more compact and efficient than his own, the one the Community scientists had given him. It was just another sign of how much more he needed to know, and didn’t have time to ask.

  He shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t recommend it. Not unless we have to. The satellite could have some thrusters and slip past it, it could be powerful enough to completely destroy the asteroid in front of us leaving us exposed before we can reach it, or there could be others to attack from other angles. Why take chances? Let’s do it, see how well it works, and then see whether we need to change the approach later.”

  More chainsaws started cutting into concrete all around him and he realised the captain and his officers were issuing orders at double speed. A sudden fluctuation in the gravity, after causing him another brief instant of panic, told him the ships drives were being engaged. Meanwhile he could see several other displays around them suddenly breaking down the asteroid fields around the closest planet, and analysing the size and nature of the rocks. When he made a decision, Daryl realised, the captain was quick about it.

  “The Captain says thank you Prisoner Daryl.” Daryl flinched, as a human being, one of his own people, started addressing him as prisoner. For the first time the title had a sting in it. Another human being considered him a criminal. Yet he had to remind himself, the man was a Force officer. He clearly had other loyalties. The same loyalties as the rest of the crew. Though how and where he could have developed them, he couldn’t begin to guess. There was also something cold in his voice. Something unfriendly, as though he’d done something to the man. Something more than just the disdain of dealing with a prisoner.

  “It is a most interesting approach and he is looking forward to seeing how it works. In the mean time you are free to return to your cell where a display will be set up to allow you to see our progress while you rest as the doctors ordered. If you wish to add some new ideas, please just speak with your guards and they will pass them on.” It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a dismissal. No sooner had the last words left the officer’s mouth then Daryl found himself being steered out of the bridge by his guards, just when he was about ready to start asking questions. But then, he had already suggested all that he could, and there wasn’t much else he could advise, so he truly didn’t mind. Except for the continuing explosions that kept shaking the ship around him.

  As he was escorted back to his cell, the pain gone and hopefully the ship safe, Daryl found the presence of mind to wonder about the two humans he had met. And for some reason about their emerald eyes. He still couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but there was something about their eyes that just struck a chord. Then there was the accent, though he hadn’t really paid it any mind at the time. But looking back both of them had an unusual accent, one he hadn’t come across before. Their vowel sounds were just a little too long, and they tended to roll their ‘r’s. Yet it took time to develop an accent, generations in fact.

  That with the fact that they were both clearly part of the Force, suggested that they had grown up in the Interstellar Community. And not alone either. It would make no sense for there to be only two of them, and both of them to be assigned to the same ship. There were clearly others. But who were they? How had they got here? That was the part he couldn’t understand. If they were human explorers who’d gone missing they would have been thoroughly searched for by Earth fleet. They didn’t let their people go missing. Besides, very few ships went missing, and as far as he had known, any that had wandered inadvertently into the Interstellar Community’s space had been returned. Often with a lot of bad publicity. Besides, why would they both have emerald eyes? Unless they were family. A strange family for sure.

  He could find no satisfactory answer, and that troubled him almost as much as the fact that there were humans clearly living out in the Community, working for the Force. Working against their own people. How could that be?

  Back at the cell his guards handed him a new translator, one of the Force’s own design, and he was suddenly able to communicate again. Actually better than before as their model had a far more advanced programme. But only for a short while until they locked him up again. The haste with which they did so was proportional to the number of questions he asked, which truly didn’t surprise him. As he’d expected they weren’t about to tell him anything classified, such as how there could be humans in the Community let alone in the Force. In fact he was sure that it would be a cold day in hell before anyone else explained that to him either. Just as if he was asking for highly classified weapons technology, these green-eyed humans were classified.

  At least he did find out before the cell door closed, that Halco was doing well, and would be back on light duty in a couple of days. It was strange how that affected him. Even now when he knew there were other humans on board, people he could presumably mix with, even if he couldn’t get any idea of how that could be, he still felt more relived to know Halco was going to be ok than he would have believed possible. Against all his expectations of life on the Targ, a Myran, a member of the great races that repressed his own people, had become a true friend. Not simply an acquaintance that he could spend some time with to kill the sense of total isolation on board, and perhaps use as a foil against the other more hostile aliens, a true friend. Perhaps his time on board was changing him. Transforming him from a simple human being into something a little more cosmopolitan.

  In a way that worried him. Made him suspect that perhaps his loyalties were changing, that he was turning away from his people. And yet it also didn’t. He’d always liked to think of himself as open minded and tolerant. As able to see the good in people, all people. And above all, to never wish harm upon another. Any other. And Halco was a good person, whatever species he might be.

  At least it gave him something to think on as he spent another long and lonely night in the brig, awaiting the answers to so many questions, and the return of his friend.

  Chapter Five.

  “Bolo!” Ryal, was getting damnably quick at spotting them on his screen. But then after the first few they’d faced he was probably getting just a little edgy. They all were. The damn things were
unbelievably nasty. In fact everything about the fourth planet of QA 40 was turning out to be nasty. Far meaner than they’d expected. He kept thanking every god known to man, that they’d over prepared, because even that hadn’t really been enough.

  The satellite had been tough enough. In the end three massive asteroids had been needed to dispatch it, after it had turned the first two into space dust before they’d reached it. Long before. But each time they’d watched with intense interest as their long range scans showed it was running out of reaction mass. The weapon was some form of rail gun, and even the tiny amounts of supercharged matter it shot at near light speed at the rocks, had to come from somewhere. And once they were used up, it had nothing left to fight with. Even now Force technicians were trying to locate its remains on the fragments of asteroid that had finally taken it out, if only to learn how such a small satellite could be so powerful.

  The balance of the active air defences were mainly massive batteries of lasers and disrupters coming from the planet and the Targ had at least been able to take them out from orbit. One by one the Targ’s own weapons, masers and lasers of unbelievable power, had destroyed them, and despite his fears, with pin point accuracy. Even buildings immediately beside the batteries had been left unscathed. Of course there could well be more waiting quietly, biding their time as they looked for a better target. A target such as a shuttle daring to land in the city itself.

  Once the ones they could see were off line though, the Sparrow had been called into action, and with infinite care they’d entered the atmosphere almost three hundred klicks from the city and then inched their way towards it, newly enhanced shields on full power, and with the Targ above, waiting to destroy anything that fired at them. But nothing had, and in less than a day they’d found a place to use as a base, seven klicks from the city, hidden behind a small hill, and landed, and then bored their first tunnel. Next had come the much more dangerous part as the bug had started making its way along that tunnel.

  They were slowly working their way through the subterranean defences under the city itself, without too many problems, though they had had to redesign the bug several times. The laser fields, though tougher than he’d anticipated, were falling apart using the decoy drone technique. It was just that because of their intensity and apparently unlimited battery life, they needed two destroyer drones instead of one. The first would be destroyed even as it took out the central processor unit. A second was needed to take out the eyes, and even that would occasionally encounter resistance and be destroyed. Already they’d had to have a second shipment of drones, hastily prepared on board the Targ, shuttled down to them.

  The tachyon shock waves as he’d designated them were even nastier, though the technique they’d developed for dealing with them was working perfectly. At the first sign of a stray tachyon emission, Ryal would bring them to a screeching stop, and then they bored themselves a side tunnel. The Force maser units were proving remarkably powerful, and within ten minutes they could have a side branch large enough to take the entire mud bug, all fifteen metres of it, and still allow the remote weapons to activate and then destroy the device.

  The device itself was even more powerful than he’d anticipated, like everything else on QA 40. In order to get the killer missiles through in seven seconds they had to be within about eighty metres of the device. And eighty metres was simply too close to the blast for comfort even in a shielded vehicle. Each time in their lay-by they watched a shock wave of tachyon charged dust blast past them like a supersonic tidal wave, racing all the way back down the main tunnel a klick or more. And each time the tunnels shook as though an earthquake had struck, and he kept suffering nightmares of being entombed in solid rock. But it hadn’t happened yet and they were getting better at shoring up their tunnels, just in case.

  The bolos though were proving something else again. Nearly indestructible tanks, they had unbelievably powerful weaponry, and the traps they carefully laid out for them weren’t really tough enough to destroy them. Not even close.

  The first bolo they’d only escaped by the thinnest of margins. A five metre strip of keldonite explosive they’d laid down across the entire floor and walls had barely even dented the damn thing. And it was fast too. Even with the newly unlimited drives the Force had rebuilt, the damn thing was a lot quicker than them. They’d been flying backwards down the tunnel at well over two hundred klicks, and watched the tank gaining on them all the way, while still blasting the hell out of their shields. Thank God for the toughened shields, easily ten times what they had been after the Force engineers had had their way with them. Without them they’d never have made the exit.

  In the end they’d only gotten out as the bolo reached the end of the tunnel and veered to the right, while the Sparrow, waiting in perfect position with its tunnel boring laser had blasted the thing as it moved into the open. Even so it had taken some major fire power and the Sparrow itself had picked up a few new scars. For its part the bug had needed major repairs, a radical redesign and had then been fitted with a second set of shield generators to boot.

  A new approach had been required, and sure enough the Force had developed one even while the bug was being repaired. The keldonite, now painted on in a fifteen metre long strip around the floor, walls and ceiling, had been enhanced with strips of titanite. A shape charged explosive that had thirty times the destructive potential of the keldonite. But more important than its explosive power was the direction of the blast, deep into the tunnel ceiling and walls. In short they were collapsing the tunnel on the bolo. Once the thing was trapped, or at least slowed, it was a relatively simple job, to evacuate and let the Sparrow clean bore the tunnel again. The Sparrow itself had a newly enlarged maser unit specifically to help with the job.

  It was wasteful of both energy and time, as Helos and the other scientists had repeatedly told them, but damnably effective. Daryl noticed that Ryal didn’t exactly object to the process either. In fact he strongly defended it against the others. He might be a remarkably polite and tolerant Xetan, but he wasn’t backwards when it came to protecting his skin. Whenever Helos or Li objected too strongly to the time wasted or the energy expense, he quite simply told them that they could drive the bug. That shut them up quite quickly. They might be happy enough to shed a few lives in the service of science, but not their own.

  Now they had another bolo to face.

  “God almighty, that’d be the fourth one today, and it’s not even lunch time.”

  “Blessed be his name. Would you please stop using that expression. And yes, I agree with Ryal. There’s another bolo ahead.” Mark Smythe, the third member of their crew, and a Force armaments expert, piped up from the rear wagon. He was one of the human Force officers, another with the emerald eyes, and a Christian to boot.

  It was as though Daryl had turned some corner on board. From the first day he’d seen one of the green eyed humans on the ship, they’d started popping up everywhere. In the hallways, on the bridge, in the gym and so forth. In fact, from having had no humans in the Community at all only a few weeks ago, suddenly he’d counted at least twenty on the Targ alone, and he didn’t believe that this was the only ship they crewed. The secret was out of the bag, and they’d apparently stopped hiding from him.

  Despite that though, they showed no inclination to talk to him. In fact for the most part they snubbed him, as they carried on with whatever they were doing, and he’d begun to feel like a whole new form of leper. An exile among even the exiles. Mark was the only exception as he’d first found himself forced to work with Daryl on the redesign of the bug, and then later been made part of the crew. Actually, as a Force armaments officer, he was technically the one in charge, though none of them really worried about the chain of command. They just did their jobs, and the screams of the one with the greatest sense of self-preservation usually won the day. It probably wasn’t a great military strategy to be proud of, but on the bug, cowardice was a virtue.

  “Sorry.” Daryl kicked himse
lf mentally. It wasn’t the first time he’d apologised. In fact far from it. He’d obviously got into some bad habits over the years, and every time he opened his mouth it seemed to be just another chance to stick his foot in it. Fortunately Mark wasn’t angry about it. He knew Daryl didn’t mean it after he’d apologised so many times. He was just peeved, because he couldn’t seem to stop it.

  Daryl was peeved too. The last thing he wanted to do was upset people. Especially human beings when he knew he was going to be stuck on the Targ for at least another year with only them for human companionship. And he still desperately wanted to know who they were. How they could be part of the Force. But no one was telling him. In fact they told him nothing about themselves other than their names and ranks, and any interrogation of the ship’s databases also failed to reveal anything as his access to that information was blocked.

  “But four in a morning! We’ve got to be getting close to something important up there. Can you check the map again Ryal?” They’d developed a map of the city from space, placing every single building, every blade of grass on it, and the problem was that they were still nowhere near the centre of the city. Even the outermost edge was at least another five hundred metres away. And above them, according to the space view, was only bare ground.