"Oh, it"s all right," he interrupted. "If it helps any, I actually happen to agree with the basic idea. I just wouldn"t have picked myself to be one of the sacrificial goats."
"I"m hoping we"ll come out of it a bit better than that," I told him.
"Uh-huh. Sure."
We finished the rest of the trip to the bay in silence, to find that the captain had already had the other five members of the team a.s.semble there.
I tried giving them a short pep talk, but I wasn"t particularly good at it and they weren"t much in the mood to be pepped up, anyway. So instead we spent a few minutes checking one last time on our equipment and making as sure as we could that our specially equipped suits and weapons were going to function as desired.
Afterward, we all sat in the boat, breathed recycled air, and sweated hard.
And I tried one last time to think. One: hivies don"t form small groups. Two: all members of a hive mind have the same experience level. Three:...
Still no use.
I don"t know how long we sat there. The plan was for the captain to take the Volga as close in as he could before the Drymnu"s inevitable attack became too much for the ship to handle, but as the minutes dragged on and nothing happened, a set of frightening possibilities began to flicker through my already overheated mind. The Volga"s bridge blown so quickly that they"d had no time even to cry out... the rest of us flying blind toward a collision or to sail forever through normal s.p.a.ce...
"The Drymnu"s opened fire," the captain"s voice crackled abruptly in our headsets. "Antimeteor lasers; some minor sensor damage. Get ready-"
With a stomach-jolting lurch, we were dumped out through the bay doors... and got our first real look at a Drymnu hive ship.
The thing was huge. Incredibly so. It was still several klicks away, yet it still took up a ma.s.sive chunk of the sky ahead of us. Dark-hulled, oddly shaped, convoluted, threatening-it was all of those, too, but the only word that registered in that first heart-stopping second was huge. I"d seen the biggest of the Services" carriers up close, and I was stunned. G.o.d only knows how the others in the boat felt.
And then the first laser flicked out toward us, and the time for that kind of thought was thankfully over.
The shot was a clean miss. We"d been dropped along one of the Drymnu"s flanks, as planned, and it was quickly clear that lasers designed for shooting oncoming meteors weren"t at their best trying to fire sideways. But the Drymnu was a hive mind, and hive minds learned fast. The second and third shots missed, too, but the fourth bubbled the reflective paint on our nose. "Let"s get moving," I snapped.
Kelly, our pilot, didn"t need any coaxing. The words weren"t even out of my mouth when she had us jammed against our restraints in a tight spiraling turn that sent us back toward the stern. Not too close; the drive that could actually move this floating mountain would fry us in nano-seconds if it occurred to the Drymnu to turn it on. But Kelly knew her job, and when we finally pulled into a more or less inertial path again, we were no more than two-thirds of the way back toward the stern and maybe three hundred meters from the textured hull.
This close to a true warship, we would be dead in seconds. But the Drymnu wasn"t a warship... and as we flew on unvaporized, I finally knew for a fact that my gamble had paid off. We were inside the alien"s defenses, and he couldn"ttouch us.
Now if we could only turn that advantage into something concrete.
"Fromm, get the laser going," I ordered. "The rest of you, let"s find some targets for him to hit. Sensors, intakes, surface radiator equipment-anything that looks weak."
My headset crackled suddenly. "Volga to Travis," the captain"s voice said.
"Neutrino emission"s suddenly gone up-I think he"s running up his drive."
"Acknowledged," I said. "You out of his laser range yet?"
"We will be soon. So far he seems to be ignoring us."
A small favor to be grateful for. Whatever happened to us, at least this part of my plan had worked. "Okay. We"re starting our first strafing run-"
Abruptly, my headset exploded with static. I grabbed for the volume control, vaguely aware of the others scrambling with similar haste around me. "What happened?" Kelly"s voice came faintly, m.u.f.fled by two helmets and the thin atmosphere in the boat.
"It"s occurred to him that jamming our radios is a good idea," I shouted, my voice echoing painfully inside my helmet.
"Took him long enough," Waskin put in. "What was that about the drive? He trying to get away?"
"Probably." But no matter how powerful the Drymnu"s drive, with all that ma.s.s to move, he wouldn"t be outrunning us for a while, anyway. "We"ve still got time to do plenty of damage. Get cracking."
We tried. We flew all the way around that d.a.m.n ship, skimming its surface, blasting away at anything that looked remotely interesting... and in the process we discovered something I"d somehow managed not to antic.i.p.ate.
None of us had the faintest idea what Drymnu sensors, intakes, or surface radiator equipment looked like.
Totally unexpected. Form follows function, or so I"d always believed. But there was clearly more room for variation than I"d ever realized.
Which meant that even as we vaporized bits of metal and plastic all over that ship, we had no idea whatsoever how much genuine damage we were doing. Or even if we were doing any damage at all.
And slowly the Drymnu began to move.
I put off the decision as long as possible, and so it wound up being Waskin who eventually forced the issue. "Gonna have to go all the way, aren"t we?" he called out. "The full plan. It"s either that or give up and go home."
I gritted my teeth hard enough to hurt. It was my plan, and even while I"d been selling it to the others I"d been hoping like h.e.l.l we wouldn"t have to use it.
But there was literally no other choice available to us now. If we tried to escape to the Volga now, it would be a choice of heading aft and being fried by the drive or going forward and giving the lasers a clean shot at us. There was no way to go now but in. "All right," I sighed, then repeated it loudly for everyone to hear. "Kelly, find us something that looks like a hatchway and bring us down. Anyone here had experience working on rotating hulls?"
Even through two helmets I could hear Waskin"s sigh. "I have," he said.
"Good. You and I will head out as soon as we"re down."The hatches, fortunately, were recognizable as such. Kelly had anch.o.r.ed us to the hull beside one of them, and Waskin and I were outside working it open, when the Drymnu seemed to suddenly realize just what we were doing. Abruptly, vents we hadn"t spotted began spewing gases all over the area. For a bad minute I thought there might be acid or something equally dangerous being blown out the discharge tubes, but it registered only as obvious waste gases, apparently used in hopes of confusing us or breaking our boots" pseudoglue grip. Once again, it seemed, we"d caught the Drymnu by surprise; but Waskin and I still didn"t waste any time forcing the hatch open.
"Looks cramped," he grunted, touching his helmet to mine to bypa.s.s the still-jammed radio.
It was, too, though with Drymnu bodies half the size of ours, I wouldn"t have expected anything else. "I think there"s enough room for one of us to be inside and still have room to work," I told him, not bothering to point out we didn"t have much choice in the matter. "I"ll go. You and Fromm close the outer hatch once I"m in."
It took a little squeezing, but I made it. There didn"t seem to be any inside controls, which was as expected; what I hadn"t expected was that even as the hatch closed behind me and I unlimbered my modified cutting torch, my suit"s exterior air sensors suddenly came alive.
And with the radio jammed, I was cut off from the others. I waited, heart thumping, wondering what the Drymnu had out there waiting for me.... As the pressures equalized, I threw all my weight upwards against the inner hatch.
For a second it resisted. Then, with a pop! it swung open and, getting a grip on the lip, I pulled myself out into the corridor- To be faced by a river of meter-high figures surging directly toward me.
There was no time for thought on any rational level, and indeed I later had no recollection at all of having aimed and fired my torch. But abruptly the hallway was ablaze with light and flame... and where the blue-white fire met the dark river there was death.
I heard no screams. Possibly my suit insulated me from that sound; more likely the telepathic bodies of a hive mind had never had reason to develop any vocal apparatus. But whatever else was alien about the Drymnu, its multiple bodies were still based on carbon and oxygen, and such molecules were not built to survive the kind of heat I was focusing on them. Where the flame touched, the bodies flared and dropped and died.
It was all over in seconds, at least that first wave of the attack. A dozen of the bodies lay before and around me, still smoldering and smoking, while the others beat an orderly retreat. I looked down at the carnage just once, then turned my eyes quickly and firmly away. I was just glad I couldn"t smell them.
I was still standing there, watching and waiting for the next attack, when a tap on my helmet made me start violently. "Easy, easy, it"s me," a faint and frantic voice came as I spun around and nearly incinerated Waskin. "Powers is behindme in the airlock. Are there any b.u.t.tons in here we have to push to cycle it?"
"No, it seems to be set on automatic," I told him. "You have everyone coming in?"
"All but Kelly. I thought we ought to leave someone with the boat."
"Good." Experimentally, I turned my radio up a bit. No good; the jamming was just as strong inside the ship as it had been outside. "Well, at least he probably won"t have any better hand weapons than we do. And he ought to be even worse at hand-to-hand than he is at s.p.a.ce warfare."
"Unfortunately, he"s got all those eighteen thousand bodies to spend learning the techniques," Waskin pointed out sourly.
"Not that many-we only have to kill maybe fourteen or fifteen thousand to destroy the hive mind."
"That"s not an awful lot of help," he said.
Actually, though, it was, especially considering that the more bodies we disposed of the less of the mind would actually be present. Weakness Number Three: destroying segments of the mind eventually destroys the whole? No, that wasn"t quite it. But it was getting closer....
The Drymnu was able to get in two more a.s.saults before the last four of our landing party made it through the airlock. Neither attack was particularly imaginative, and both were ultimately failures, but already the mind was showing far more grasp of elementary tactics than I cared for. The second attack was actually layered, with a torch-armed backup team hiding under cover while the main suicide squad drew us out into the corridor, and it was only the fact that we had heavily fire- and heat-proofed our suits beforehand that let us escape without burns.
But for the moment we clearly still held the advantage, and by the time all
six.
of us were ready to begin moving down the corridor the Drymnu had pulled back out of sight.
"I don"t suppose he"s given up already," Fromm called as we headed cautiously out.
"More likely cooking up something nasty somewhere," Waskin shouted back.
"Let"s kill the idle chatter," I called. My ears buzzed from the volume I had to use to be heard, and it occurred to me that if we kept this up we would all have severe self-inflicted deafness long before the Drymnu got us. "Keep communication helmet-to-helmet as much as possible," I told them.
Fromm leaned over and touched his helmet to mine. "Are we heading anywhere specific, or just supposed to cause as much damage as we can?"
"The latter, unless we find a particular target worth going for," I told him.
"If we a.n.a.lyze the Drymnu"s defenses, say, and figure out that he"s defending some place specific, we"ll go for that. Pa.s.s the word, okay?"
Good targets or not, though, we were equipped to do a lot of incidental damage, and we did our d.a.m.nedest to live up to our potential. The rooms were already deserted as we got to them, but they were full of flammable carpeting and furnishings, and we soon had a dozen fires spewing flames and smoke in our wake.
Within ten minutes the corridor was hazy with smoke-and, more significantly, with moving smoke-which meant that whatever bulkheading and rupture-control system the Drymnu was employing, it was clear that the burning section wasn"t being well sealed off from the remainder of the ship. That should have meant big trouble for the alien, which in turn should have meant he would be soonthrowing everything he had in an effort to stop us.
But it didn"t happen. We moved farther and farther into the ship, setting fires and torching everything that looked torchable, and still the Drymnu held back.
For a while I wondered if he was simply waiting for us to run out of fuel; for a shorter while I wondered if he had indeed given up. But the radio jamming continued, and he didn"t seem to care that we were using up our fuel destroying his home, and so for lack of a better plan we just kept going.
We got up a couple of ramps, switched corridors twice, and were at a large, interior corridor when we finally found out what he had in mind.
It was just the fortune of the draw that Powers was point man as we reached that spot... just the fortune of the draw that he was the one to die. He glanced around the corner into the main corridor, started to step through-and was abruptly hurled a dozen meters sideways by a violent blast of highly compressed air. Waskin, behind him, leaned into the corridor to spray torch fire in that direction, and apparently succeeded in neutralizing the weapon. But it cost us precious seconds, and by the time we were able to move in and see what was happening to Powers, it was too late. The dark tide of bodies withdrew readily from before our flames, and we saw that Powers, still inside his reinforced suit, had nevertheless been beaten to death.
"With tools, looked like," Fromm said. Even through the m.u.f.fling of the helmets his voice was clearly shaking. "They clubbed him to death with ordinary tools."
"So much for him not understanding the techniques of warfare," Waskin bit out.
"He"s figured out all he really needs to know: that he"s got the numbers on his side. And how to use them."
He was right. Inevitable, really; the only mystery was why it had taken the Drymnu this long to realize that. "We"d better keep moving," I shouted as we pressed our helmets together in a ring.
"Why bother?" Brimmer snarled, his voice dripping with anger and fear.
"Waskin"s right-he knows what he"s doing, all right. He"s suckered us into coming too far inside the ship and now he"s ready to begin the slaughter."
"Yeah, well, maybe," Fromm growled, "but he"s going to have one h.e.l.l of a fight before he gets us."
"So?" Brimmer shot back. "What difference does it make to him how many of his bodies he loses? He"s got eighteen thousand of them to throw at us."
"So we kill as many as we can," I put in, struggling to regain control.
"Every bit helps slow him down."
"Oh, h.e.l.l!" Brimmer said suddenly. "Look-here they come!"
I swung around... and froze.
The entire width of the hallway was a ma.s.s of dark bodies charging down on us-dark bodies, with hands that glinted with metal tools.
This was it... and down deep I knew Brimmer was right. For all my purported tactical knowledge, I"d been taken in by the oldest ploy in human military history: draw the enemy deep inside your lines and then smother him. Iglanced around; sure enough, the bodies filled the corridor in the other direction, too.
And for the last time in my life I had wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Except that this time I wouldn"t be the only one who paid the price.
We had already shifted into a back-to-back formation, and three lines of torch fire were licking out toward each half of the imploding waves. Leaning my head back a few degrees, I touched the helmet behind me. "Looks like this is it,"
I.
said, trying hard to keep my voice calm. "Let"s try to at least take as much of the Drymnu down with us as we can-we owe Messenia that much. Go for head shots-pa.s.s it down to the others."
The words were barely out of my mouth when I was deafened by another of the air blasts that had gotten Powers. Automatically, I braced myself; but this time they"d added something new. Along with the burst of air threatening to sweep us off our feet came a cloud of metal shrapnel.
It hit Waskin squarely in the chest.
I didn"t hear any gasp of pain, but as he fell to his knees I clearly heard him utter something blasphemous. I gave the approaching wave one last sweep with my torch and then dropped down beside him. "Where does it hurt?" I shouted, pressing our helmets together.
"Mostly everywhere," he bit out. "d.a.m.n. I think they got my air system."
As well as the rest of the suit. I gritted my teeth and broke out my emergency patch kit, running a hand over his reinforced air hose to try and find the break. Suit integrity per se shouldn"t be a big problem-we"d modified the standard suit design to isolate the helmet from everything else with just this sort of thing in mind. But an air system leak in an unknown atmosphere might easily prove fatal, and I had no intention of losing Waskin to suffocation or poisoning while he could still fight. I found the leak, gripped the piece of metal still sticking out of it- "Oh, h.e.l.l, Travis," he gasped. "h.e.l.l. What am I using for brains?"
"What?" I called. "What is it?"
"The Drymnu, d.a.m.n it. Forget the head shots-we got to stop killing them."
Hysteria so quickly? "Waskin-"
"d.a.m.n it, Travis, don"t you see? It"s a hive mind-a hive mind. All experiences are shared commonly. All experiences-including pain!"
It was like a tactical full-spec bomb had gone off in the back of my brain.