The Dreen were not the only alien species encountered. One of their subject races, the catlike Mreee, had pretended to be friends just long enough to scout out the new human prey. The destruction of the Dreen gates had almost certainly wiped out the Mreee as well. Contact with them had certainly been cut off. But the survivor Mreee, part of the Dreen invasion force, had been less upset about that than many expected. They were a proud race that had seen themselves fall into slavery to masters who took not only their planet’s resources but the very bodies of their citizens for conversion into Dreen. A clean death at the hands of an honorable foe was preferable.
One friendly race had been encountered, as well. The Adar were in advance of humans technologically but had nearly as much trouble with the Dreen. It was the Adar, though, who had passed on two items. One was a bomb big enough to shut down the Dreen gates. They hadn’t used it themselves because the only way to crack the gates was for the bomb to go off very close to one. If it went off on the wrong side, the planet wasn’t going to be habitable. The humans were desperate enough to use it and it worked, shutting down not only the gate that it was sent through but all other Dreen gates.
The second device, though, was in a way more useful. The Adar had found it on an ancient planet whose sun was just about dead. Nothing more than an enigmatic black box the size of a deck of cards, it had surprising properties. Any electrical charge caused it to release orders of magnitude more energy than inputted. Weaver eventually guessed that it was at least in part a warp drive. And he was right.
Using the box, which was not only a warp generator but a reactionless drive generator, the U.S. government had converted a submarine, the USS Nebraska, into a spaceship. It had taken seven years, and Weaver had jumped ship into the Navy early in the process. One of the problems he was having with this hill, admittedly, had been caused by too much time in a swivel chair redesigning a submarine to go where no man had gone before.
But Weaver, and a team of thousands, had eventually done it. And then Weaver, acting as astrogator, had gone out with the rechristened Vorpal Blade. Humans, seeing the first mirrorlike gates, had christened them Looking Glasses. The Adar found human thought process fascinating and had insisted that this ship be named in accordance with that thought. Since the ship was an Alliance spaceship, they’d had enough pull to push the name through.
Unfortunately, the Adar, while fine scientists and philosophers, had very little understanding of human humor or thought processes. So the acronym for Alliance Space Ship had slipped past their filters before it was too late.
On the ASS Vorpal Blade, Weaver, a crew of one hundred and fifty-four officers, NCOs and enlisted, forty-one Marines, and a handful of scientists had ventured forth on a local survey. They had limped back with five Marines, a couple of scientists and a hundred and twenty crew. But they’d found out what they were sent to find out: Space may be an unforgiving Bitch but She was nothing compared to landings. On the other hand, they’d also found allies and some interesting technology.
On a moon of a gas giant circling the otherwise unremarkable star 61 Cygni Alpha they’d encountered a race of rodentlike mammaloids. Named the Cheerick in the language of the country the Vorpal Blade contacted, they were similar in form to chinchillas or hamsters and at their highest level of technology were about at War of the Roses level. In other words, they’d just started to press the edges of real science, climbing out of the darkness of alchemy. However, they also had records dating back thousands of years that indicated that from time to time, for reasons unknown, another race would rise up and destroy them. Dubbed “The Demons” they had begun to show up shortly before the arrival of the Vorpal Blade. The Blade had, fortunately, been forty light-years away at the time of their first sighting so it was innocent.
Eventually, through about half of their casualties, the scientists of the Blade had determined that the “Demons” were some sort of biological defense mechanism that targeted electrical emissions. By that time, the majority of the science team and a goodly number of Marines had bought the farm. But before they died, the science team had gotten a lock on the source of the Demons.
It was left to Weaver, Chief Warrant Officer Miller, USN, a handful of local Royal Guardsmen and a small team of the remaining Marines to stop the scourge. Fortunately, they’d been accompanied by the ship’s linguist, Miriam Moon. Normally as nervous as a rabbit, Miss Moon had been the person who figured out how the system worked and, using a local, shut it down.
While Weaver was away on his forlorn hope, though, the ship had been under attack. Most of the “Demons” were ground mounted but there was an aerospace component as well, giant red and blue “dragonflies” with a very fast reactionless drive system and lasers that shot out of compound eyes. The Blade had been chased into space by them and ripped very nearly to shreds. The local who had taken control of the system, Lady Che-Chee, had had to tow the ship back to the planet using the same flies that had ravaged it.
Enough repairs had been enacted to allow the ship to limp back to Earth, but making it spaceworthy again had been a half-year process. Weaver had acted as the ship’s executive officer on the trip back but gratefully turned over the job on arrival to a more experienced officer. Since then, though, he’d been deeply involved in the repairs and upgrades. Like, pretty constant sixteen-hour days involved.
This was his first real break, since the major repairs were completed and all that was left was details. He’d grabbed at the new CO’s suggestion, more like order, to take some leave. The ship wasn’t due to leave for its next mission for two months. So he’d headed down to his real home in Huntsville to visit friends and reacquaint himself with the trails, baby-head sized rocks, roots, boulders, downed trees, screaming downhills, and extremely rough and technical climbs of Monte Sano Mountain.
He pulled his left foot out of the pedal and planted it as he braked just before the whoopdie-doos. Just as he started down, his cell phone rang. The ringtone — “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns’n’Roses — was barely audible over his pounding heartbeat. Bill welcomed the break, he was that fragged. He bit the tube hanging from the helmet strap in front of his face and sucked down water from his CamelBak between gasps for air.
Despite the fact that he was on leave, he was required to be on call. Since he not only had a deeper grasp of the science behind the drive but a knowledge of every bolt and system in the ship that was unsurpassed by even its commander and XO, sometimes there were questions that only he could answer. And it appeared that there was another one.
“Weaver,” he said, panting for breath. The earbud he was wearing automatically activated at his voice.
“Commander Weaver, Captain Jeller, SpacComOps. You’re required to report at the earliest possible moment to your ship.”
“Shit,” Bill muttered. “Uniform?”
“Whatever you’re wearing at the moment, Commander,” the captain on the phone said. “There has been an incident…”
Eric tuned out the priest as the sermon started. It was a new one since he’d left for the Corps, a woman of all things. His family was Episcopal but while Eric had heard there were no atheists in foxholes, he didn’t recall praying much on the last mission. Mostly he’d been too scared spitless to remember any.