Tenacious

54

It is impossible to come to a dead halt in space.

Always, you are orbiting the center of the galaxy at a mind-bending pace.

Usually, you are orbiting a sun at a more reasonable speed, but you are still moving.

Finally, most times a ship is orbiting a planet of some sort. We humans don’t go to space for the view, we go for the territory. Maybe we aren’t as territorial as the newly discovered felines, but we’re looking for living space and resources.

Kris knew all of these laws of physics. Still, from her flag bridge, she ordered Captain Drago to bring her squadron to as near a dead halt as possible when they were five hundred thousand klicks from the moon where the aliens had built their orbital refuge.

Making allowances for the huge gravity well of the gas giant only a few million miles away, the squadron drifted in space. Every mind, every sensor aboard, focused its full attention on the mystery that lay ahead of them.

Every scrap of spare computing power concentrated on analyzing what the sensors revealed.

It pretty much came to one big nothing.

“As far as the electromagnetic spectrum is concerned, there is no there there,” Chief Beni reported from his usual place at sensors on the bridge. “Every instrument we’ve got says there is just nothing happening up ahead.”

“Visuals?” Kris snapped from where she sat in flag plot.

“They are still rather vague,” Professor Labao reported from her elbow. “We are unsure if that stems from the junk that has been injected into the space around the base, or because whatever we are looking at just doesn’t look like what we are looking for.”

Kris did not smile although the report was as perfectly noncommittal as she’d expect from a scientist reluctant to admit he had nothing to add to their knowledge base.

No doubt, it was very embarrassing.

“Captain Drago, lead the squadron closer. If there is a creep speed, use it.”

That got a heads-up among the feline contingent observing them from the corner of Kris’s flag bridge. The admiral actually smiled at Kris.

Of course, a feline smile showed a lot of teeth. Long, pointed ones.

Let’s keep these folks as allies, Kris reminded herself. For the millionth time.

At four hundred thousand klicks, the observed results were no better than they had been at five hundred thousand.

By three hundred thousand, they were starting to get a decent picture.

It was ugly.

Two ships rolled and drifted alongside a long cylinder. Occasionally, they bounced off each other.

“There’s no guidance there,” Captain Drago concluded. “They’re totally out of any semblance of control.”

“But are they dead?” Kris asked. “I wouldn’t put it past them to have their lasers loaded and on automatic. Whoever closes in gets hit with one last, massive broadside.”

“They’d need sensors to know there was anyone there,” Taussig pointed out from his place at Kris’s other elbow.

“There could be something passive,” Kris insisted.

“It would have to draw some juice,” Captain Drago pointed out on net. “We are not getting anything at all. Not the low hum from capacitors, nor anything in the lower electromagnetic spectrum from something waiting to power up.”

Kris eyed Taussig, who sat at her elbow since he was now a passenger on the Wasp, riding along with the remnants of his Hornet.

“Take us in closer, Captain Drago. Professor Labao, I want that particular sector of space examined like no bit of vacuum has ever been before. I don’t trust these folks to give up without a fight.”

“There is always a first time,” Jack said.

“For a human, maybe. For them, never. It’s not ‘enlightened,’” Kris spat.

Slowly, as slowly as the laws of physics allowed, they closed in.

“We are getting some electromagnetic activity,” the chief reported at two hundred thousand klicks. “It’s in the form of low-powered electric servo motors. They’re very weak and not much of them. The kind of things we use for minimum life support.”

“So someone might be alive?”

“Possibly, on what’s left of the space station.”

“Give me a picture,” Kris ordered.

Kris knew space stations. She’d blown up at least one and fought to save another. A cylinder was the usual design for them. A simple tin can in space.

This one was no exception.

Or at least it had started as no exception.

Now. Not so much.

Unless the aliens had intentionally built a twisted and malformed cylinder, this station had suffered a catastrophic failure. It was easy to see why.

In a dozen or more places, the hull looked singed, burned by the venting of superheated plasma that these spaces on the hull had not been designed to contain. The vent points showed signs of wreckage drifting by them or hanging on by a thread.

No wonder it had been so hard to get a decent picture of the alien base. Its very death had cloaked it in a veil of destruction.

“Where is the activity?” Kris asked.

“In the extreme forward section of the cylinder,” Professor Labao said. “The area farthest from a vented reactor.”

Nelly highlighted that section. It was well away from the self-destruction of the reactors. While the other end of the station appeared to be completed and done with, this end still showed where construction had been going on.

Had some low-caste workers there chosen life over death? The odds were long against it. But a mother and father had chosen life for themselves and their two babies once in Kris’s experience. Only the babies had survived, but still, of the almost hundred billion aliens Kris had slaughtered, at least two had chosen life.

“Captain Drago, I believe the Wasp has the best armor left after the last fight.”

“Yes, we’re at eighty-five percent,” Captain Drago reported. “Why?”

“Let’s leave the rest of the squadron at this distance. Set the strongest Condition Zed you can on the Wasp and nose in there. If I were you, I’d keep my engines away from them for the first pass,” Kris said, “but what do I know? I’m just the admiral.”

“And the bloody Longknife,” Drago muttered under his breath. Almost.

Kris didn’t hear him. Very carefully, she didn’t hear.

The squadron swung wide of the moon while the Wasp crept closer, if a ship traveling at a hundred thousand klicks an hour relative to the huge gas giant looming over them all could be said to creep.

They were fifty thousand klicks out when the aliens made their move.