The Celaran Solution (Parker Interstellar Travels Book 9) Read online

  Siobhan neared the Quarus corpse. She saw a part of it wriggle again.

  Damn that thing is creepy. The fact it won’t stop moving is—

  Her device told her it got a hit nearby.

  “My sensor has found free oxygen!” Siobhan reported.

  “What? Where?” Telisa9 gasped.

  “Here. Inside that corpse.”

  “By the Five. In the alien’s body?”

  “That makes sense. These things live in water. They’re probably carbon-based, so their metabolism uses oxygen, like ours,” Arakaki said.

  And their blood is red like ours, so uses an iron-based carrier.

  “So it has oxygen in it. So what? The water does, too. We would have to separate it,” Caden said.

  “No, I said free oxygen!” Siobhan said. “There’s a hollow space inside that thing. Some kind of gas bladder with almost pure oxygen in it.”

  Arakaki swam forward.

  “Point if you can. I don’t want to cut the organ open,” she said.

  “If you uncloak, I can send you this feed and you can overlay it,” Siobhan replied. She uncloaked and Arakaki followed suit.

  Siobhan sent the feed from her device to Arakaki’s link. After a moment, Arakaki took her blade and started to cut.

  More of the blood came pouring out. Siobhan was struck again by how much it resembled Terran blood. Arakaki looked like a mad diver cutting into a giant octopus, except the blood was red, not blue.

  “It’s still moving,” Arakaki noted.

  “Yes,” Siobhan agreed nervously.

  “Cover me,” Arakaki said.

  “You got it,” Caden said, heading over.

  “No, get ready to start electrolysis,” Telisa9 ordered. Her echoform moved over toward Arakaki and the growing garden of blood swirling around her.

  New threads of red fluid intermingled with the water as she cut.

  “Red blood like us?” Telisa9 commented.

  “Maxsym would say: I wonder if they use the same oxygen transport molecule. I say, get the oxygen and leave it.”

  “Actually, someone take a sample of its blood or its flesh,” Telisa9 ordered. “If we get out of this alive, Maxsym will owe us big time.”

  An ugly purple organ sac floated upward, trailing connective tissue. It was as large as Arakaki’s torso. Arakaki handled it carefully. She left the last bit of flesh connected to keep the sac from dragging her to the ceiling.

  “It’s in that,” she said.

  Arakaki cut it carefully. Some bubbles escaped from a tube, so she pinched it shut.

  “Siobhan. Carefully, take this weapon. I don’t have enough hands for this.”

  Siobhan pushed herself forward through the water and took the ultrasharp. Arakaki pulled out a suit hose from her shoulder.

  “I’m going to try and extract it all. We can’t hand this mess back and forth without losing a lot of the contents. Once I have it, we’ll transfer it between our suits which will have a much better seal.”

  Arakaki punched the nozzle of her suit hose into the soft tube that had leaked before. The sac visibly deflated. The entire area had an even red haze now that the blood had dispersed. Siobhan wondered how quickly the ship would filter it out.

  “Got it.”

  It sent its robot in here to kill us. Now it has saved us. Or at least, bought us time to die another way.

  Arakaki discarded the organ and connected to Siobhan’s suit.

  “It won’t go as far four ways, but here you are,” she said.

  Siobhan’s suit reported the replenishment of oxygen. It did not have enough storage for all of it in its pressurized cannister, so she configured the suit to release nitrogen and increase the oxygen content within the suit. Arakaki distributed the rest of the oxygen.

  Siobhan breathed deeply. Every breath felt like pure life. She had been in some close calls with low oxygen supplies before, but not while trapped in a liquid-filled alien ship. She handed the blade back to Arakaki.

  “How long do we have?” Telisa9 asked.

  “That added forty more minutes. I’m showing almost an hour of survivability. We have to get out of here soon,” Caden said, stating the obvious.

  “Or find another one to kill,” Arakaki said.

  Okay, she’s scary.

  “Set up to get oxygen from the water,” Telisa9 ordered.

  “We don’t have a PEM block,” Siobhan said. “There are several back on the Iridar.”

  “Not membrane electrolysis, I mean the primitive way. It takes power, but our lasers aren’t useful if we’re already dead.”

  “Maybe we can find a power ring around here and figure out how to bleed off some of its field,” Caden suggested.

  “Then get looking. In the meantime, assume we’re using the stun baton’s cell. Arakaki, keep watch. Tell us if more are coming,” Telisa9 ordered.

  Siobhan pushed her tall frame through the water. It resisted her efforts, dragging each limb on every movement. Her low-gravity origins had found yet another way to punish her.

  You wanted danger. You got it, she told herself, breathing rapidly.

  Chapter 16

  Magnus watched the tactical as the two PIT ships hurtled out toward the SOS they had received. He still wondered if the transmission had been a decoy meant to draw them away from the planet, but with so little information, it made sense to respond as if the message were genuine.

  “There’s nothing out there,” Maxsym said from the Vovokan Iridar. His tense voice gave away his state of mind.

  “Let me help you with our sensors,” Magnus said. “If there’s some way to coordinate our search, we could split the area, but I don’t know how to share the search patterns between a Terran ship and a Vovokan one.” He looked at Telisa next to him in the bridge-lounge of the Terran Iridar, imploring her to join.

  “I’ll help too,” she said. “All three of us might be as good as one Cilreth.”

  “I thought her specialty was Vovokan software,” Maxsym said.

  “Her specialty was finding people,” Telisa said. “But she was good at everything related to coordinating missions from back on the ship.”

  Her way of trying to avoid the danger. Although she was brave so many times. Maybe she was more afraid of letting us down in a combat situation.

  “How about we search spinward from the reported location and Maxsym takes the other side?” Telisa suggested.

  Magnus opened up an ECCM suite in his PV. He found a saved configuration for detecting cloaked Celaran ships and tried it out.

  His new pane came up. It did not detect any anomalies at the source of the transmission. He started a scan pattern for a hemispherical volume spinward of the reported target, then tried to think of another approach.

  “It’s possible our Terran scanners aren’t up to this,” Magnus said.

  “I can help,” Marcant said. “Maxsym, you’ll be receiving my request to use your ship’s sensors from here, if you can authorize me—”

  “Yes, yes, that much I can do,” Maxsym said.

  Telisa and Magnus waited for a minute while Marcant searched using the Vovokan ship’s superior technology.

  “There’s something there! A cloaked ship,” Marcant told them. “We never would have noticed it without the attendant call.”

  “Vovokan? Celaran?”

  “I don’t think so,” Marcant said. “I don’t know.”

  Marcant doesn’t say that very often.

  “No reason to think it’s not Quarus as the message said. The Quarus must have taken a page from the Celarans,” Magnus said. “We know they’ve learned to detect cloaked Celarans, so...”

  “So they’ve probably learned cloaking tricks of their own,” Telisa finished.

  “How can we land on this vine?” Lee asked.

  Telisa’s mouth was set. She was thinking furiously.

  She’s not going to give up on them, that’s for sure. The only question is how to go about saving them.

  “It may not m
atter. I see other ships out here,” Maxsym said. “We have to get out of the system now!”

  “What?” Telisa said. “We don’t see them.”

  “One moment...”

  A dozen more ships appeared on the Iridar’s tactical.

  “A whole fleet? Maybe we do have to run,” Magnus said.

  “Those are Celaran ships!” Marcant interjected.

  Most of the contacts in Magnus’s PV changed color to green. The remainder were still changing to green one at a time. The original one remained red.

  “How did we miss them before?” Telisa demanded.

  “I don’t think they were there before,” Maxsym said.

  “Contact them,” Telisa said. “Can we do that without giving ourselves away?”

  “It certainly raises the danger. But we’re all at long range right now,” Marcant said.

  “Then we have to. Get one of them on the channel!”

  “I’ll try. But if these are Celarans from some other faction, they won’t be able to understand us anytime soon,” Marcant said.

  A few more seconds ticked by. Magnus saw another entity joined the channel, but its identification headers were non-standard.

  “You have it,” Marcant said.

  “We’ve discovered a hidden Quarus ship in the system,” Telisa transmitted.

  “Trunk of a huge vine, that’s a space station. We believe it was left to monitor the fate of our homeworld,” came the reply. The Terran communication protocols finally resolved the speaker as Cynan.

  “Is that really you, Cynan?” Telisa asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Your friends knew about the Quarus station?”

  “Watch the threat underleaf, we have been preparing to strike back against them.”

  Now he speaks as if he’s been one of the Cylerans all along. He has been, I suppose, just separated from them.

  “Our friends went into a Trilisk compound on Celara Palnod, now one of their attendants has shown up at this location!” Magnus said. “It carried a message saying that they’re in trouble, trapped inside that station.”

  “Could the Quarus have faked the message?” Cynan asked.

  “That’s what I’m wondering. How is it our team is there at all? Maybe this is a trick,” Magnus said.

  “It would be very difficult for them to fake. The Vovokan protocols are secure,” Marcant said on the shared channel. “Especially given the Quarus’ extremely alien methods of communicating in large batches of information.”

  “Then how?”

  “Could the Quarus be working with the Trilisks?” asked Marcant.

  If that’s true, then we’re outmatched. Just when it looked like the Space Force and the Celarans had a chance.

  “I don’t know,” Telisa said. “But if there are Trilisks involved, it’s probably that one of the Quarus leaders here might be a Trilisk. It could be like the situation back on Earth before the revolution.”

  Magnus nodded.

  “Cynan? We need to help our people right away. They could be running out of breathable air,” Telisa said.

  “The star is bright overhead, our schedule can be accelerated,” said Cynan.

  “We have to go in now. Half our team is over there,” Telisa said.

  “Vines on fire, I’ll see if I can convince my comrades to join you.”

  “Thank you,” Telisa said.

  “What can we do when we get there?” Maxsym said.

  “If our team has been captured, we can’t open fire on the ship,” Marcant said.

  “This is a commando vessel,” Magnus reminded them. “Though its main focus is drop attacks, it’s also equipped for ship-to-ship incursion. We’ll have to board them.”

  “Equipped how?” asked Maxsym.

  “We have remoras for knocking out ship electronics, as well as a spinner auto-matcher to delay the Pirate’s Option. The port and starboard hatches are designed for breaching target hatches, or even enemy ship hulls in some cases,” Magnus said.

  “Slow down there!” Maxsym said. “That ship might be much more powerful than ours. We don’t even know how large it is or if there’s more than one. We could be outmatched. Even if you manage to disable it for a while, how can you board an alien ship filled with water?”

  Filled with water. Damn, I hadn’t even thought of that.

  “I have to say I agree with Maxsym here,” Marcant said. “Our ships are small and there are only a few of us. We aren’t equipped to assault a ship with a liquid atmosphere. We haven’t trained for something like that.”

  “We have the battle spheres,” Telisa pointed out.

  “They can be effective even in water,” Achaius said on the channel.

  “Perhaps too effective,” Adair said. “We would have to worry about blowing entire parts of that ship away, including those containing the team.”

  Magnus listened to the AIs carefully. They did not seem to agree with each other.

  Is this what it’s like in Marcant’s personal channel? He has those two AIs chattering at him all the time?

  The minutes ticked by while the two ships used their gravity spinners at full power to accelerate. Though their drives were able to translate out of FTL quickly, the gravity drive could not quickly bring them beyond light speed, especially not mid-system. It would take over an hour to arrive at the location of the stealthed base.

  “Our forces will join you on the vine,” Cynan said. “We wish to repay you for your assistance at our colony.”

  “That’s fantastic. Marcant, can you—”

  “Coordinating our intercept courses on the target base,” Marcant said.

  “We might actually have a chance of getting them out alive now,” Telisa said to Magnus privately.

  “I suggest we head to the arsenal,” Magnus said, rising to his feet. She got up to follow him. Magnus felt admiration.

  There’s no questioning whether or not we’re going in, even into a ship filled with water. Those are our people out there.

  “I hate to mention this...” Magnus said.

  “Marcant, please inform the Cylerans of my... condition,” Telisa asked publicly. “If I’m taken by a Trilisk, they should be able to take me out.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t go in at all,” Marcant said.

  “The Trilisks are almost all gone. There’s not one hiding under every rock. I’m going in to get our people.”

  They walked in silence for a moment.

  “I suppose we should go in with only one ship?” Telisa asked, changing the subject. “Having three spinners there so close together must be even more dangerous?”

  “Actually, no. Bringing in two spinners under our control is to our advantage as long as we coordinate perfectly. It gives us more power to control the gravitational eddies that would result from intentional mismatch,” Marcant answered.

  “Then I leave it to you to coordinate with their assault ship,” she said.

  They took a left turn and came to the door of the armory. The door opened for their links and they went in to see what they had.

  “They want to spread the weight across two vines by putting some of their cyborgs on this ship for the attack,” Lee said on the team channel.

  Apparently she is in separate contact with Cynan.

  “That’s welcome,” Telisa said. “We only have the battle spheres, Magnus, and me.”

  “Seriously? You’re going in there?” Marcant asked.

  “We’ll let the machines go first,” Telisa said as if that explained it all. “We need to arrange a mid-trip rendezvous,” Telisa said.

  “I’m working with them now,” Marcant said.

  “Maxsym, keep your distance with your ship. Stay vigilant and let us know if any other ships approach. When this one gets attacked, they may call for any local reinforcements that might still be hiding around the system.”

  “Will do,” he replied.

  “If things get dicey and you’re not sure you’re going to make it, sacrifice an attendant
and send word back to the Space Force,” Magnus said.

  “Very well,” Maxsym said dourly.

  He doesn’t like the idea of dying out here. Can’t say I blame him.

  “What do we have that works in water? The lasers, the breaker claws, and... ?” he pondered aloud.

  “Well, at least some of the water will be draining,” she said. “Don’t rule out projectiles completely. Here, we have one box of water rounds.” Her eyes swept over the arsenal. “Lasers, grenades, and breakers. We have these ultrasharp swords, but... no range and I imagine it’s hard to swing one underwater.”

  Magnus nodded. He set down his rifle, which he felt would be too unwieldy underwater. He replaced it with a laser pistol, two extra energy rings, and another grenade. Then he loaded another pistol with the water rounds and added it to his belt.

  “What does a stunner do underwater?” Telisa asked.

  Magnus considered it. On the one hand, water transmitted the vibrations better over distance, but on the other hand, it would presumably take a lot more energy to shake water than air. Also, he wondered if the directionality of the stunner would be affected.

  “Probably makes an awful noise, but I doubt it would work. Well, against Terrans. Who knows what it would do to Quarus? They could be sensitive.”

  Telisa left the stunners on the rack. “I don’t know if they’re even waterproof.”

  “I’m afraid the Quarus will school us on what’s effective underwater,” Magnus said.

  “We need to research better weapons for underwater use,” Telisa said.

  “The Space Force has some,” Magnus said. “We can look into it for later, but we don’t have time to fabricate any. This is what we’ve got. The breakers and grenades will work well as long as we make sure we’re not where the shock wave will get us, too.”

  “Even if we’re somehow not in the water, we might kill our teammates that way,” Telisa pointed out.

  “We have a solution for rendezvous in ten minutes,” Marcant said. “They can enter through vacuum, so I’ll house them in the assault bays and drop them off the same way.”

  Magnus and Telisa traded looks.

  “I guess we won’t be going into an airlock,” Magnus said.

  “Waterlock,” Telisa corrected. “Yeah I guess not. This could get messy.”