The Catalyst

-Chapter 37-


My marines and I crawled over the hull like angry ants, but the ship was like a sealed mason jar-there just wasn’t any way in. We avoided the underside of the ship and thus were nowhere near the deadly belly-turret. Every hatch we could find was slagged shut from the inside.
Kwon showed up eventually and we tried a group burn-through, concentrating our beamers on a single spot to make it white hot. I had no doubt we could have done it with a beam tank, but blasting our way into the hull wasn’t working, at least not quickly enough. Sandra stood nearby, silent and staring.
“This is not happening, Colonel,” Kwon told me.
“Yeah,” I said. “We need something heavier.”
“Colonel?” a voice called into my helmet. It was Gorski, who was my sole man on ops right now. I’d given him Sarin’s job until she recovered.
“Go ahead, Gorski.”
“We’re about to go through the ring,” he said.
“Not much we can do about that, is there?”
“No sir,” he said, and signed off.
I looked up worriedly. I didn’t see the ring, but that wasn’t a surprise. We were going so fast, the cruiser would just sail up to the ring and through it before our eyes had time to register it. Still, I was worried. It seemed so odd, the way these Macros ignored us. They didn’t even answer our radio signals. We were less than nothing to them. We were fleas on a dead dog.
“Let’s pull back a bit onto the top of the cruiser’s hull,” I said. I led the way, and my marines followed. “I don’t really like the idea of going through a ring while standing out on top of this ship. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Our boys did it before,” Kwon said. “They all were sucked out into space from the ring in the Worm mound.”
“Yeah,” I said. “About that, the Worms had a direct conduit the last time we saw them, directly from the ring inside their giant mound out into space in another star system. A pretty nice way to launch ships. Just imagine, you build them on the ground, put them on rails and roll them out into space. Not having to lift anything up into orbit is a big savings of effort. Better yet, your construction people could build the ship under normal planetary conditions, not out in space in vacc suits, fighting with low-gravity.”
Kwon shook his head in his helmet. “If you say so, sir. I think having a hole on the surface of your world would be a big problem. Wouldn’t it suck all your air out into space?”
I chuckled. We’d reached the aft region of the ship by now, where our few bricks were clamped on. “There was some kind of control possible. When the Macros screwed me last time into going down there and connecting up that ring to turn it on, I learned it is possible to alter the behavior of the rings. The Macros did it that time. If you could choose when your ring was active, you could send through your ships whenever you wanted.”
Kwon didn’t say anything more. I thought he might be disturbed at the idea of playing with such forces. Maybe he thought I was getting one of my bright ideas and would try to set a ring like that up on Earth. I wasn’t that crazy…was I? I had to admit that maybe, just maybe, I was.
I was walking along the hull of the cruiser with Sandra following me. She had that knife still—and she made me oddly nervous with it. Her mannerisms weren’t the same as they’d been before she’d been in the coma.
“Sandra?” I said. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
“Try me.”
“I’m thinking about cutting people up.”
I blinked. She was right. I hadn’t wanted to know. I told myself she’d always been a hothead. She’d be all right if I just gave her some time to calm down. Maybe this was all a result of her brain injury. The microbes had fixed her—but who knew what they considered fixed to be when it came to the structure of a human brain?
We were in mid-step when we went through the ring. There was no warning from Gorski or anyone else. Maybe he didn’t know the exact moment when we’d hit it, or maybe he thought he’d already told me and didn’t think it was a big deal.
I felt the now familiar shudder of going through the ring. That feeling of dizziness, as if I’d just experienced a tiny, swaying earthquake. My left foot was clamped onto the hull, my right foot was up, and coming back down. I had the sensation that when I put my foot down it would keep going—perhaps into an abyss. It was as if I was falling, but for less than a second. Then I stomped my foot down firmly and I knew we were through. We were somewhere else, an unknown number of lightyears away from where we had been a moment before.
“I hate that feeling,” Sandra said.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Especially out here. Look, we’re in the tri-star system.”
At that moment, an explosive timer was activated. I had no way of knowing it at the moment. I had a few calm seconds, which I used to lift my arm and point toward the twin yellow suns, orbiting one another tightly. One sun was close, nearly as big as the sun appeared from Earth. The second was distant and smaller from our perspective, looking like a brilliant moon. The third star, a red dwarf, glowed like a distant ember below and to the right of the twins, from our perspective.
“This has to be Alpha Centauri,” I told Sandra. “Everything about these stars looks right. It feels oddly good to know we are relatively close to home—only four short lightyears away.”
“One more jump and we reach Earth,” she said wistfully. “Home is so near, and yet so far.”
I was momentarily encouraged, because this was the first thing she’d said since awakening that didn’t sound furious. My relief was short-lived, however, as we ran out of time about then.
It started with a brilliant flash off to my left—it came from underneath the prow of the cruiser. The ship had run her nose smack into something. I didn’t know what it was at the time. Fortunately, the charge wasn’t very large. Less than one of our tiny mines, in fact. Another two flashes went off, and all around me men were turning, hunkering down. For some of them it was already too late. The blast and bits of debris blew a good fifty marines off the hull.
A hand hit my back and forced me to crash face down onto the hull. I went down hard, and all the air was driven from my lungs. I turned to curse at Kwon—but he wasn’t there. Only Sandra crouched over me. Her hand was on my back, pressing me down. My knife was in her other hand. I blinked at her. Could she have done that?
My next assumption, when I could think, was that the Macros had finally made their move. They’d gotten tired of having us out here, crawling around on the skin of their ship. They’d come out to remove us by force. I screamed into my helmet for everyone to take cover. The command was absurd, but automatic. There wasn’t any cover.
At any moment, I expected Macro marines to come boiling up onto the hull, but they didn’t. Vapor and bits of floating metal, quickly cooling from white-hot to smoking dull gray went by my helmet.
“Captain Kwon?” I called. “Get our marines moving. If the enemy is sallying out onto the hull, I don’t want them to get a foothold while we huddle out here.”
Kwon roared, and soon a few hundred marines were advancing, crawling over the hull. Sandra helped me up. She lifted me with one arm and set me on my feet. I stared at her for a second in shock. Was this Marvin or some other robot in a vacc suit? It couldn’t be. I recognized her by her small suit and the knife that glittered in her hand. Everyone else out here had a gun. I knew then that Sandra wasn’t just pissed off; she had gained in strength somehow. The microbes had done something to her when they’d fixed her brain. They’d kept on fixing things, improving them.
I didn’t have time to worry about all that right now, however. I advanced with the vanguard of marines, crawling forward over the hull to recon the situation. When we got to the smoking impact points, and looking into the craters, we could see the exposed tubes of the cruiser.
“Mines,” Kwon said, thinking faster than the rest of us for once. “The ship must have run into a few.”
I thought of the Worms then, and what I’d said about their ability to send objects or ships through to the other side from the surface of their planet. There were many possibilities, of course. The Worms had deployed mines here before. This was the same ring and it was very close to their homeworld Helios. Maybe they’d put a missile up or a mine-layer for the next intrusion into their system. The interesting thing was the mines were laid on the far side of the ring, the Alpha Centauri side. If the Worms had placed these, they were definitely being tricky. The cruiser had glided right into them without time to react. I thought to myself that whoever had put these here, they were game-changers. I wasn’t the only one who was employing this extremely effective tactic. Maybe the days of sailing serenely through rings at high speed were gone for every side now that this trick was seeing regular use.
“Advance!” I shouted, ordering my men into the smoking breach. Whatever its cause, we had an opportunity to invade the cruiser, and anything was better than sitting on the hull waiting to die.
We rushed inside, not knowing what to expect. Marines were all around me, charging forward. We moved forward employing leapfrogging maneuvers, one team crouching and aiming down a corridor while the next advanced quickly to a new spot providing some kind of cover. We’d made it a few hundred paces before we met with resistance. A pair of Macros caught us, showing up at each end of a long tubeway. Everyone fired at once. The light flared up, darkening my visor. I was in the middle of the pack, I aimed my pistol but didn’t fire as there were marines between me and the enemy, blocking my shot.
Sandra pushed me down again then. I heaved back up, snarling. “Stop doing that!”
She pointed upward mutely. A hot glow had appeared overhead. The Macros were burning down to us from an upper deck. The two at either end of the hall were firing, and then drawing back as our beams spat return fire at them. Two marines were hit, but not dead. They howled and cursed in my headset.
“Let’s pull back,” I shouted. “This is a trap.”
Hot beads of molten metal dripped onto my suit and sizzled there. Sandra and I looked up just as the ceiling opened. A piece of metal like a manhole cover clanged down between us. A Macro nosed through. It had a short-ranged weapon attached to its head section. I’d seen the type before. They normally did ship-repairs and were more akin to welders than warriors.
I fired at it, and it withdrew with a scarred thorax.
“Is it alone?” Sandra asked.
“I think so,” I said.
Sandra did an unexpected and impressive thing then. She sprang up through the hole over our heads. Now, we are all nanotized with strength superior to that of normal humans. We could do things no one back on Earth could manage, such as ten foot leaps up into holes. We would not normally perform this action, however, with an unknown number of enemy waiting on the other side of said hole.
“Wait!” I shouted after her, but she was already gone. I saw her heel for a second, and then nothing. I wondered in horror if I was going to be treated to watching a Macro tear her apart after going through hell to keep her breathing this long. I didn’t hesitate, but I did curse as I sprang after her. I couldn’t let her face whatever was up there alone.
By the time I struggled through the hole and fired my hand beamer into the Macro’s face. After a second, I took my finger off the firing stud. The Macro was already dead. I looked around wildly, but it was the only one up here.
Sandra was on its back, grinning. She had slashed open the thing’s back and used the fantastically sharp edge to sever the wires that connected the cpu in its thorax to the rest of its body. This combat technique was in our manual and our training discussions, but I couldn’t recall having ever seen anyone do it before.
“Stop worrying,” she said.
I stared at her for a second. “You’ll get yourself killed going off by yourself.”
She made her lips pout. “I doubt it,” she said.
I shook my head and jumped down into the corridor again. I had to call up to her twice to get her to join us.
“Let me go off and scout,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going lose you the same day I got you back. Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get you out of that coma?”
“For all I know you kept me sleeping and worked on lining up my replacement,” she said.
I stalked away from her angrily. While we’d been occupied with the Macro in the ceiling, my men had taken out the other two. We pressed ahead toward the engine room. Overall, resistance was light. The ship had no marines, as they had apparently all been used in the invasion attempt against us. We were up against the equivalent of mechanics and gunner’s mates. The crew fought tenaciously, but there were only about thirty of them and they hadn’t been built for personal combat. After less than an hour, the ship was ours.