Desjani was just settling into her own seat. “Checking on repair work,” she told him. “We’ve almost fixed all of the things that were already fixed before the damned enigmas broke them.”
“Half an hour to intercept of the freighter by the task force, Captain,” Lieutenant Casque said.
“Very w—” Desjani broke off, staring at her display.
Geary did the same, barely suppressing a curse.
“They blew it up,” Casque reported as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying.
On Geary’s display, the neat symbol representing the enigma freighter had been replaced by a spreading cloud of dustlike debris. It had happened two hours ago, but the force of the event still felt immediate. “How the hell did a freighter blow up with that intensity?”
“Run an analysis,” Desjani ordered her bridge team. “Ancestors preserve us,” she added to Geary. “They self-destructed their ship full of their own people fleeing that installation. Is there anything they won’t do to keep us from learning anything about them?”
“I’m starting to wonder.” Somehow, he wasn’t surprised when new alerts sounded on the display. Fixed defenses closest to the installation had launched kinetic projectiles, whose trajectories were clearly aimed not at any Alliance ships but at the installation itself, itself still more than thirty light minutes distant or six hours’ travel time at point one light speed. That volley had barely been detected when the image of the installation itself smeared and burst outward. “They self-destructed the installation, and they launched a bombardment to pulverize whatever is left from that.”
“Charban was right, though it looks like the aliens didn’t want to risk waiting to blow the place until we had people down there and might have already learned something. What do we do now?” Desjani asked. “Head for one of the inhabited planets?”
“Please do not,” Rione suddenly said. She and Charban had come back onto the bridge unnoticed until then. “I am very much afraid of what they would do if we tried to approach one of those worlds.”
“They wouldn’t—” Desjani began, then closed her eyes. “Maybe they would.”
“What do you think, General Charban?” Geary asked.
“I agree with my fellow emissary, Admiral.”
“It’s technically not our fault if they kill themselves,” Desjani grumbled. “And, no, I’m not prepared to argue that point with the living stars when I face them. But what else do we do? They have us checkmated. Either they’ll blow us and themselves to hell with hypernet gates, or they’ll blow themselves to hell if they can’t stop us from learning anything. I prefer the second option if we have a choice, but either way, we learn nothing.”
Geary exhaled slowly, thinking. “All right. We stay on course for the installation. Maybe something survived the self-destruct and will survive the impact of that bombardment.”
Some time later, a short message came in from the task force, Captain Badaya looking dissatisfied. “We’ll continue on course to examine the debris field in case there’s anything worthwhile left, then move to rejoin the fleet, Admiral.”
THE remnants of the installation were too badly torn up to reveal anything beyond the basic composition of what it had been constructed of. Carabali had advised against sending personnel down to the surface of the moon, arguing that more traps might be undetonated and waiting for human presence to further destroy the already-mangled ruins. But uncrewed probes found nothing, even the size and shapes of rooms in the installation hard to determine because of the level of destruction.
Captain Smythe called in with an engineer’s perspective. “They must build things with an eye to being able to totally self-destruct. You can’t just annihilate a structure this badly by setting off a few charges. You need to have a lot of explosives or other destructive materials, and they need to be placed right. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the structures contain built-in charges.”
“Isn’t that extremely hazardous?” Geary asked.
“Says the man who’s riding a ship loaded with weaponry, dangerous circuitry, unstable fuel cells, and a power core that can blow it into tiny pieces? And who’s doing this through space, an environment totally hostile to human life? It’s what we’re used to, Admiral. They may be used to living inside walls packed with explosives.” Smythe brightened. “They might have some extremely stable compounds that require just the right means of detonation. I’d love to have a look at that sort of thing.”
“If we find any, I’ll let you know. Do you think their cities might be built like that?”
“It’s possible. Though placing enough nukes at the proper intervals would accomplish the same purpose.”
The task force had reached the expanding cloud of debris that had been an alien freighter and slowed down to conduct a careful examination of it. When his message finally reached Geary, Badaya seemed to be in inexplicably high spirits considering the failure of the task force’s mission to capture the freighter, but his first words explained his happiness. “Admiral, for once the aliens failed to totally destroy everything. Dragon found a partial body. At least we finally know what they look like. I have to give Commander Bradamont full credit for realizing that the aliens might well garb themselves in clothing that we’d consider stealth material. She took Dragon around the edges of the debris field from the freighter, looking for cool patches among the debris, and found what seems to be about a one-half-intact body that was somehow partially shielded from the blast that destroyed the freighter.”
An image appeared next to Badaya. Geary flinched, not in revulsion at the alien itself but at the state of the body. Explosive decompression on top of the damage done by the destruction of the freighter had left gory remnants. Still, he could make out what seemed to be a tough skin, with patches of thin scales in a few places. The crushed skull still had a small snout visible. In life, the enigma must have been lean and long, so skinny that it looked to human eyes as if it had been stretched out by someone pulling on both ends. “Make sure medical staff and our civilian experts see this,” he told the communications watch, then called the fleet’s chief medical officer.
“I assume you want to look at this in person,” Geary began. “Where should I have Dragon’s shuttle deliver it?”
“Tsunami, please, Admiral. They have a particularly good surgeon on there who has some autopsy experience. That’s also the ship carrying the, um, experts on intelligent nonhumans. How long until we see it?”
“They’re forwarding scans to us, but it will take close to a day for the task force to rejoin us so you can physically examine the remains, Doctor.” Another call, this to the much more distant Illustrious. “Captain Badaya, my compliments to you and Commander Bradamont on a job well done. As soon as your task force rejoins the formation I want Dragon to shuttle those remains to Tsunami.”
Finally, they had found something. Perhaps his prayers had been at least partially answered.
GEARY was in his stateroom when Badaya called again as his task force rejoined the rest of the fleet, the ships returning to their places in the larger formation. “Sorry I couldn’t get that freighter for you, Admiral, but at least we got that partial body. Ugly, aren’t they?”
“It’s hard to tell with all the damage to it,” Geary said.
“That’s a point. No major problems to report, but I’d appreciate it if you’d have a stern talk with Invincible’s commanding officer.”
“Now what?”
“Captain Vente isn’t taking it well that this is my division. He keeps making digs about me being junior to him, so he should be in charge. During this operation, he kept balking at orders to show his unhappiness that I was in command of the task force instead of him.”