Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Read online

  Marshall felt as though the air had been sucked out of his lungs. ‘The entire planet?’

  ‘Everything,’ Harper confirmed. ‘The cities were burning, the forests, everything. Whatever went through there utterly destroyed all life, probably by some kind of orbital bombardment. Fortitude looked intact and there was nothing on the scopes so we sent two fighters in to investigate. Turned out the ship was enveloped in some kind of ice that came to life and made a grab for the Phantoms.’

  Marshall placed his hands behind his back, visions of Titan’s encounter of months before flashing through his mind. ‘Ice?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Harper replied, ‘I know it sounds crazy but this stuff moved and it moved fast, we lost both fighters…’

  Marshall saw the regret in Harper’s eyes but there was no time to let him dwell on it. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We got hit from behind,’ Harper said. ‘No warning, as quick as I just said it. One direct hit on the stern quarter and man, that was all she wrote. We lost pulse drive, plasma batteries, most of our shields and communications. It was all we could do to turn around and leap before the next shot hit us.’

  ‘Did you identify your attacker?’ Marshall asked.

  ‘Identify? No. See? Yeah, we saw it. Had to be a million tons plus, not CSS design, not anything I recognized. The bridge section alone had to be about twice Titan’s mass.’

  Now Marshall felt the first true stirrings of fear deep inside him, uncoiling like a cold snake probing the night for prey. Even if Harper was subconsciously exaggerating the size of their assailant there was no doubting the heavy damage that Endeavour had sustained, and Marshall reminded himself that Harper was not a captain known for embellishments. If he said it was a million tons plus…

  ‘What about Defiance?’

  Harper’s head sank and he rubbed his temples with his hands.

  ‘We were gone before she arrived,’ he replied. ‘We fired a single alert beacon so that she’d detect it when she dropped out of super luminal, gave her a chance to turn tail and run before she got hit by that thing. It was all we could do. Have you heard from her yet?’

  Marshall shook his head.

  ‘If it went down as fast as that, she won’t be far behind you.’

  ‘I’m just hoping she picked up Tyrone and Ellen.’

  ‘The Phantom pilots you lost?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Harper said and then frowned. ‘You don’t look surprised about anything I’m saying.’

  Marshall took a deep breath.

  ‘We’ve seen this before,’ he replied. ‘CSS deemed it something that should be kept under wraps for fear of spreading panic among the populations planet side.’

  If Harper felt any sense of betrayal that he and other CSS officers had not been informed about the potential dangers lurking beyond the Rim colonies, he showed no sign of it. Instead, he moved closer to Marshall.

  ‘Forget that. Panic’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen when that ship gets here. It’ll take half the fleet just to keep her in check. We have no idea what that vessel is capable of, but tracking Endeavour here has gotta be within their capabilities. We left a tricky trail for them but I don’t hold out any hope they’ll be fooled for long.’

  Marshall nodded.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll be fooled at all,’ he replied. ‘We’ve lost contact with about six Rim colonies in a roughly spherical area around the Sol System in the past twenty four hours.’

  Harper blanched.

  ‘They’re cutting us off,’ he said, his tactical training and knowledge born of the same schools Marshall had attended. ‘They hit Ayleea to remove any chance of outside support or a defensive flanking manoeuver.’

  ‘And then they strike us directly,’ Marshall said. ‘Report to me as soon as the docs are done with you. I need to take this to JCOS and then deploy the rest of the fleet.’

  ‘You can’t take the fleet up against that thing, it’s too big to defeat in a face to face engagement.’

  Marshall looked over his shoulder and grinned. ‘From what you’ve told me, I think that we have an idea of how they’re going to attack and that might just give us an edge.’

  ‘If you go in, I’m ready for command,’ Harper insisted.

  ‘I know,’ Marshall replied, ‘but Endeavour’s out of the game. Sit tight Travis, I’ll find a spot for you.’

  Marshall walked out of the room and was flanked once more by the two Marine guards as they strode out of the sick bay. He was immediately confronted by his aide de camp, a young man by the name of Morris who had been assigned to him by Commodore Hawker.

  ‘Sir, you have a priority signal from earth, classified Archangel.’

  Marshall nodded and immediately made for the nearest private conference room. He strode in even as Arianna Coburn and the JCOS were coming the other way, all looking for him. Without a word he pointed to the room and the JCOS followed him in. As soon as the guards were on station and the hard light doors were closed he spoke.

  ‘It’s confirmed,’ he said to them simply. ‘Fortitude is lost, Ayleea has fallen and the species encountered by Endeavour is predatory and is heading this way. We have no word yet from Defiance, but the semi biological material we encountered a few months ago aboard Titan is back and this time it’s brought friends.’

  Marshall let the JCOS digest this information. Hawker spoke first.

  ‘Friends?’

  Marshall nodded. ‘Endeavour’s data is being transferred so we’ll get a look at our new enemy shortly, but Captain Harper estimated her at around one million tons.’

  A simultaneous sound of escaping breath whistled from the mouths of the JCOS. Most everybody knew that Titan and Pegasus, the fleet’s largest warships, each had a mass of around half a million tons. A single vessel of the type described by Captain Harper would dwarf them both.

  ‘Its firepower was sufficient to disable the frigate Endeavour with a single shot,’ Marshall went on, ‘which struck her stern and disabled most of her internal systems and propulsion. She made an emergency jump with what she had left, but it’s fair to say one more shot would probably have split her hull.’ Marshall hesitated for a moment as he saw an image of the vessel appear on a holo screen in the room, the data from Endeavour’s encounter being streamed to them automatically. ‘She’s a predator.’

  The immense vessel loomed before them, modelled in three dimensions from the data gathered by Endeavour before she fled the Ayleean system. The immense hull was larger than any two CSS warships, and tremendously large plasma cannons were mounted on strakes below and to either side of the hull. The computer had selected an arbitrary code name for the vessel: Marauder.

  ‘Any data on her weapons? Rear Admiral O’Hara asked.

  ‘Plasma based, so not dissimilar to ours,’ Marshall replied, ‘but her output was far greater. Endeavour didn’t get a good reading on her shields but it’s fair to say they’ll be powerful, more so than our own. In short, this isn’t a fight we can hope to win unless we outnumber her significantly. And, of course, we don’t know if there are other ships like this one out there.’

  ‘There could be an armada of those things waiting for us,’ Arianna Coburn whispered, her voice horrified. ‘The entire fleet could be wiped out in a single engagement.’

  ‘Not if we use our heads,’ Marshall said, refusing to be cowed by the size of the enemy vessel alone. ‘As expected, the first space faring species we’ve encountered in the cosmos is more advanced than we are, but they still have warships that can be recognized for what they are. That means that whatever species is behind this likely shares some attributes with humanity.’

  ‘Tell that to the Ayleeans,’ Hawker said as he saw an image of Ayleea in flames appear before them. ‘That species just wiped a few billion of them out in a single strike.’

  Marshall thought for a moment as he looked at Ayleea, the vast fires burning across the planet and the cities glowing with flames.

  ‘One ship couldn’t have done all
that,’ he said, ‘not even as one as big as that Marauder.’

  Both Hawker and O’Hara nodded.

  ‘They must have had ground forces on the surface,’ Hawker said. ‘A bombardment from orbit would have required hundreds of ships and would have taken days to complete on that scale.’

  Marshall stared for a moment into the blackness of space outside, the uncaring darkness and unspeakable age of the universe staring silently back at him. There were no other known species out there in the cosmos that could come to the rescue of Sol and its outlying systems. There were no gods to rely upon for such were the fantasies of men long gone. There were no miracles. All that he had, all that mankind had, was knowledge built up over centuries and the wits and cunning of any creature that had evolved to survive millions of years.

  ‘They softened up their targets first,’ he said finally.

  ‘How?’ Arianna Coburn asked. ‘We have had no unrecorded intrusions into Sol space in the past few years, except for a single Ayleean cruiser which you yourself intercepted and destroyed before it could reach the orbital cities.’

  Marshall paced up and down as he spoke, Saturn’s graceful ringed arc glowing in the light from the distant sun through a nearby porthole.

  ‘Captain Harper reported the presence of the biological material that attacked Titan,’ he said, ‘and that we once found entombing an alien vessel. It was construed from previous investigations that the material was both alive and yet a machine, an organic entity capable of transforming itself into any shape or form.’

  ‘Where are you going with this?’ Hawker asked, his normally calm and collected features pinched with concern.

  Marshall nodded.

  ‘This species, whatever it is, might send forces in advance of its fleet in order to test the defenses of target worlds. We do something similar, sending Special Forces soldiers in behind enemy lines to cause havoc and weaken an enemy.’

  Admiral O’Hara glanced at the image of Ayleea’s burning forests and cities.

  ‘You think that they infiltrated Ayleea before they attacked?’

  ‘I do,’ Marshall agreed, ‘and were able to cause the collapse of their society before the main force arrived. I think that they will do the same here and we need to be prepared for it. The question is, how do they intend to infiltrate our system?’

  ***

  XVI

  New Washington

  ‘Will you tell me what the hell is going on with you?’

  Nathan hurried into the police communications office with Kaylin Foxx close behind him, Vasquez and Allen with her. He saw a clerk at the desk inside and spoke quickly.

  ‘I need you to put out a sensor sweep for the location of an Erin Sanders, age twenty six.’

  Foxx blinked beside him. ‘She’s dead, Nathan.’

  Nathan turned to her as the clerk initiated the search. ‘That’s my point. She’s dead all right but we don’t have her ID chip. It’s got to be somewhere and I don’t think that whatever killed her intended to just leave it behind.’

  ‘But we already checked for her ID chip and it wasn’t transmitting,’ Foxx pointed out. ‘It must have been destroyed when she was killed.’

  Nathan turned back to the clerk, and as he did so a display flashed and a small icon appeared. Nathan peered at the display and saw Erin Sanders walking along a street near North Four.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured. ‘Dead woman walking.’

  Foxx stared at the display in amazement. ‘It must take time for the chips to re–activate inside the new body.’

  Nathan saw her expression collapse as she realized what was happening. Memories of the shape shifting forms on Titan from months before flashed through her mind and she understood immediately what was required.

  ‘They need to move around,’ Nathan said. ‘If these things are invading, they can’t remain static. They must be able to learn, and so they’ll figure out they need the ID chips of their victims to travel and to not look unusual or suspicious.’

  The clerk’s head turned slowly and he looked up at them. ‘Invading?’

  ‘Keep this to yourself,’ Vasquez ordered with a stern gaze. ‘Word of this gets out, I’ll know where to send CSS troops.’

  The clerk’s face blanched white and he turned back to stare at the screen.

  ‘I’ll get Schmidt on this right away,’ Foxx said.

  ‘Don’t call for back up though,’ Nathan warned. ‘We can’t afford to spook it or we’ll never find it again.’

  Foxx nodded as she dashed from the communications office and Nathan turned back to the display.

  ‘I need you to track her, real careful,’ he ordered the clerk. ‘Relay the information to our ocular implants but don’t call any support vehicles out no matter what happens, okay? Leave that to Schmidt. We need to pick this one up real quiet.’

  ‘Understood, detective.’

  Nathan hurried out of the communications room with Vasquez and Allen and followed Foxx as they made for the precinct lot on the roof of the building. Nathan jogged up the steps to the roof’s access door, the building having been constructed in simpler times when ordinary doors still prevailed. The door’s locking mechanism sensed their approach and cleared them to pass, and they pushed through and outside.

  Nathan still felt a roiling vertigo whenever he walked out onto the precinct roof, or any other in the city. Above, the vast and curved hard light “sky” protecting the city from the frigid vacuum of space revealed the hundred meter thick North Four arm rising up toward the spaceport at the city’s center. Nathan could see elevators travelling up and down it as spacecraft and shuttles moved slowly to dock with the station far above him. Beyond, the other side of the city loomed, its backdrop earth, reflecting the brilliant sunlight.

  ‘Quit daydreaming, c’mon!’

  Foxx jumped in as their cruiser detected her approach and automatically opened its broad gull wing doors.

  ‘Take the opposite route to us!’ Nathan yelled to Allen and Vasquez. ‘That way we can close it down!’

  Vasquez gave him a thumbs up as he and Allen jumped into their own squad vehicle. Nathan slipped into the passenger seat beside Foxx as he heard the deep growl of the EM Drive spinning up. Within moments the cruiser lifted off the roof of the precinct building, Foxx guiding it skillfully up into the busy skies above the city.

  New Washington spread out below them as Nathan activated the police computer and connected the relay from the precinct communications office to the cruiser. Instantly a marker appeared in South One with directions, estimated time of arrival and other pertinent data scrolling alongside the marker.

  ‘Got her,’ Nathan said, ‘or it.’

  Foxx hit the transmit switch on her control column. ‘Allen, Vasquez, you gettin’ this?’

  ‘Dead girl walkin’ on South One, we’re inbound counter clockwise,’ Vasquez replied.

  ‘Roger, we’re clockwise, four minutes.’

  Nathan looked ahead as Foxx accelerated, the cruiser rising up amid a convoy of vehicles variously cruising, climbing or descending to their various destinations. The private vehicles and taxis were all confined to the mid lane, with the upper lane restricted to police and emergency vehicles. Foxx accelerated further and climbed above the highest of the buildings as she skimmed close to the upper surface of the station’s rim.

  The squad cruiser shuddered as it encountered invisible vortexes of warm air rising from the busy city below and coiling against the inner surface of the station, the updrafts more violent in areas of the city where sunlight could stream down through the hard light “skies”. Brilliant shafts of sunlight illuminated the city streets in rectangular pools as the cruiser streaked overhead, the moist air rising and then cooling as it passed out of the sunlight and began to fall in diaphanous veils of rain shot through with rainbow hues.

  ‘Two minutes now,’ Foxx said. ‘I’ve got support vehicles coming in, sirens off.’

  ‘Good,’ Nathan said as he checked his side arm.
‘Where’s Schmidt?’

  Foxx glanced at the display and smiled. ‘Already on site.’

  The doctor’s holographic projection allowed him to appear instantly anywhere that supported Holo sapiens projection units, which these days was pretty much anywhere due to the Living and Non Living Sentient Being Rights Act of 2319. Not only had it been deemed that holosaps were both fully deserving of all the rights cherished by ordinary people, but that they could not be denied the right to generate their projections wherever they wished as to deny that right was effectively an imprisonment. Furthermore, the permanent erasing of a holosap’s core data bank had been legally described as an act of murder, which the media had quickly latched on to with the term “digicide”. At least thirty living humans were serving time for the murder of holosaps across the colonies, one or two of the convicted themselves holosaps now confined inside digital prison cells after ordering the termination of their brethren at the hands of criminal gangs.

  ‘One minute,’ Foxx said.

  She switched the cruiser to autopilot and slowed, allowing the vehicle to descend into the normal traffic flow above South One as she checked her side arm. Nathan could see on the display four squad vehicles arranging themselves in a quiet cordon in streets around the target, coordinated by Schmidt as Allen and Vasquez closed in from the far side of the city.

  The cruiser moved into a part of the city shadowed by a solid metal ceiling. Not all of New Washington benefited from the transparent hard light surfaces as it was deemed too expensive to retrofit the entire city. Its ageing infrastructure was already badly in need of development but the Governor’s office had restricted funds to more pressing needs such as upgrades to the dehumidifiers and atmospheric recirculation that life aboard New Washington depended upon.

  ‘Setting down,’ Foxx said as she programmed the autopilot, selecting a rooftop landing space within a hundred meters of the marker signal.

  ‘I can see her,’ Schmidt’s voice reported on the channel. ‘I’m a few paces behind, on the junction of 44th and Clifton.’