Ascendant (The Royal Marine Space Commandos Book 3) Read online

  “Ok, right, yes, could be useful,” conceded Marine X, “anything else I should know?”

  “The lungs look hyper-efficient as well, and the synapse tests suggest the reflexes should be off-the-chart fast,” said Brin, enthusiastic now that Marine X’s hostility had receded somewhat, “and I think, even on the ground, you’ll find it moves very quickly indeed. But you might need to eat quite a lot; that clone probably burns calories at a very high rate.”

  “Hmm,” said Marine X thoughtfully, strutting around the cloning bay and looking at himself in the reflective surfaces of the machines. He flicked out his wings again and gave them a flap. “Does this mean I can break a man’s arm with one blow of my wings?” He flicked them back in again.

  Brin frowned, not really wanting to think about why Marine X might need to be able to do that.

  “Maybe, but you might want to take it easy for a few days, just while you get used to it.”

  Marine X looked back at the technician as he pulled on the cut-down uniform the Deathless Harpies used.

  “Easy? Yeah, sure,” he said, flexing his arms and popping out his wings again to give them an experimental flap. He pulled them back in and fixed Beaufort with a steady gaze.

  “I’ll take it,” he said finally, “but put me in an Ogre next time, right?”

  The technician nodded furiously as Marine X and Captain Warden left the cloning bay.

  “They’re growing more clones on Ascendant at the moment,” said Brin after the door had slid shut, “better let them know about Marine X’s preferences.” Beaufort nodded and sat down at a terminal to compose a message. “Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes if he gets deployed to a lizardman next time,” said Brin, grinning evilly behind his colleague’s back.

  3

  The temporary council chamber in the depths of Fort Widley had become, over the last week, considerably more permanent-looking and was now seriously crowded as the councillors filed in for the meeting. Restoration of the cloning bays to full capacity had coincided with the end of the fighting, allowing the casualties to be deployed and the colony to return to near strength.

  “Yes, yes, settle down,” said Governor Denmead as the councillors jostled for space and squeezed themselves onto the benches arrayed around the walls of the chamber. “I know this isn’t ideal and yes, it’s on the list of things to fix, but, just for now, we all have to do the best we can with what we have.”

  Eventually they settled and Johnson, Denmead’s assistant, was able to bring the meeting to order.

  “You’ve all had briefing packs, and I’m sure you’ve all digested them,” said Denmead, knowing for a fact that some of the councillors had only been deployed to new bodies that morning and so were now trying to catch up with several weeks’ worth of updates, “so I’m going to leap straight into the main topic.” She nodded at Johnson, who flicked at his data slate until an image appeared on the new display screen at the end of the room. The councillors shuffled and craned their necks until they could all see the screen.

  “This is the Deathless base where Captain Warden and his Troop engaged the enemy about ten days ago and where Lieutenant-Colonel Atticus,” said Johnson, nodding to Atticus where he sat in a quiet corner, “fought a second engagement just yesterday. These are new images from the microdrones deployed over the base to keep an eye on things.”

  “And we’ve now set the AI to watch for enemy movement,” said Atticus, his voice hissing slightly through the alien mouthparts of the Deathless Rupert clone, “so that we won’t be surprised again by any mischief the remaining Deathless are plotting.” He frowned, not entirely happy to again be wearing a Deathless clone rather than the standard RMSC body he had requested. Some mix-up at the cloning bay, Warden had said.

  “As you can see,” said Denmead, highlighting a section of the base and zooming in using her own slate, “this part isn’t a static building, it’s actually a spacecraft.” She paused to allow the murmur of disquiet to drift away as the newer councillors gazed in awe at the images before them. “It’s now clear that the sole role of this craft is to land on a planet and construct the defensive walls and principle habitation and manufacturing structures of a military operating base. Then it moves to a new location and repeats the process.”

  “In other words, it’s a fully-automated base-building machine,” said Atticus, “and we think that it had almost finished its work when we stumbled across it.”

  “Fully automated?” said Grimes with a challenging eyebrow raised almost to his hairline, “So you’re telling us that there might be more of these things, more bases out there, spread across the face of the planet, ready to deploy Deathless troopers?” There was another round of uncomfortable murmuring from the assembled councillors; these were clearly questions they hadn’t considered.

  “No,” said Atticus firmly, leaning forward slightly to better engage, or maybe intimidate, his audience, “examination of the logs and files of Ascendant show that this craft was launched only fairly shortly before we found it and so had time to build only one base, namely that one,” he finished, pointing at the screen.

  Grimes nodded, a flash of relief showing on his normally gruff and inscrutable face. “Well, that’s the first piece of good news we’ve had in a long time.”

  Atticus smiled, it made a pleasant change to get a positive response from Grimes, who was normally dour and pessimistic.

  “Sorry, excuse my ignorance,” said one of the newer councillors, “but for those of us only recently restored to active duty, can you please give us a quick update on what’s going on? What is Ascendant, for starters?”

  Denmead and Atticus shared a look then she sighed. “This is all in the briefing pack, Len, but I know you’ve only been up for a few hours. Ascendant is a captured enemy starship, renamed by Vice Admiral Staines, whose fleet is currently in orbit around New Bristol. The enemy is descended from one of the lost Arks, the Koschei, a Russian vessel populated by body hackers and ultra-liberals intent on pushing cloning technology as far as it would go in their search for functional immortality.”

  “And that’s why…?” said Len, gesturing at Atticus’s unusual body and grinning weakly.

  “Yes, Len, that’s why Lieutenant Colonel Atticus is wearing such an unusual clone. This one was seized from the Deathless and is, we believe, the model used by their officer classes. Look, there’s a ton of detail in the background files, and I don’t want to spend much more time on the subject, except to say that we are at war with a force that seems to be very much stronger and better resourced than we are, here, on New Bristol.”

  “I might add,” said Atticus, “that current projections based on new data from Ascendant suggest that the Deathless may be more widespread and more capable than we had previously thought. All of this information has been relayed to the Admiralty in Sol, of course, and we expect further guidance as soon as they have had a chance to digest it all. Marine reinforcements are arriving as we speak and will be deployed as resources allow.”

  “In the meantime, though, we’re on our own,” said the Governor.

  “Thank you, Governor,” said Len, sitting back in his chair, “I’ll go through the briefing pack,” he added, waving his data slate, “and see if there’s anything I can do to help. I have experience in first-contact theory and encounter simulation, if that’s any use.”

  “We’re a little past the point of first contact,” said Atticus grimly, “but the techs are doing a deal of planning and could always use some help.”

  “If we could just return to the topic at hand,” said Denmead testily, shooting a glance at Atticus before treating the councillors to a somewhat warmer smile, “we wish to discuss the mothership and the plans we are now making for it.”

  “Of course, Governor,” said Atticus, pulling out his own data slate and flicking at it with his long, alien fingers, “in brief, ladies and gentlemen, we wish to repair the mothership, repair the base to some degree and then use both for our own purposes. Our circu
mstances, as you may have noticed,” he paused to wave his hand at their surroundings, “are somewhat reduced. This vessel’s fabricators are considerably more sophisticated than our own and we plan to use them to both rebuild Ashton and then to extend our own resource extraction efforts.”

  “In other words, we’re going to return this vessel to service as quickly as possible and use it to build our way back to the habitable, desirable and pleasant colony that we had achieved before the Deathless arrived,” said Denmead.

  “That works for me,” said Grimes, showing an unusual amount of enthusiasm, “but what did you mean by ‘considerably more sophisticated’? Are we talking bigger structures, faster mechanisms or better materials?”

  “All three, as far as we can tell,” said Denmead, flicking at her slate so that the display showed close-up images of the inside of the base. “The damage done during Captain Warden’s attack was considerable but then so was the effort expended. You’ve all seen the videos, I expect, and if you haven’t, you really should watch the one of the truck hitting the base wall.”

  She paused and pulled another image onto the display. “You can see here, in this shot of the edge of the wrecked wall that circled the base, just how the wall was put together. We know that this was built in less than a week; what does that tell you, Mr Grimes?”

  There was a pause while Grimes examined the image, then he sat back.

  “I’d need to see a sample to be sure,” he said cautiously, “but it looks like it might be some sort of carbon nanotube-reinforced foamcrete.”

  “Catch,” said Johnson, tossing a lump of rock across the table to Grimes.

  “Yes, look,” said Grimes excitedly, “you can see the distinctive patterning caused by the addition of the nanotubes to the foam mixture. Very clever, very advanced. We’ve got stuff like this back home but it isn’t used much because of the time it takes to make it and the difficulty of getting it to work. Theoretically, though, you could form it into pretty much any shape you want by spraying layers on top of each other, like you would with an old 3D printer, which means you can build fantastically strong and elegant structures easily and quickly.”

  “And we don’t do that because…?” prompted Denmead.

  “We don’t do it because it’s overkill,” said Grimes, “this stuff is tough, granted, and you can build incredible structures with it, but it’s expensive and difficult, and there’s just no need, most of the time.”

  “But if the Deathless have worked out how to do it quickly…?”

  “Well, yes. The whole base is made of this stuff? Then I would very much want to get a look at their machines, as would Smith, I think, and we’d want to deploy them as widely as possible across both New Bristol and the rest of the Commonwealth. This could be a game-changer for new colonies, asteroid mining, space habitat fabrication. Why, with this material, if you can make it fast enough, you might be able to build orbital megastructures.”

  Grimes tailed off, lost to the conversation in a daydream of vast, star-sized orbital megastructures.

  “And that’s why we want you to help with this effort,” said Atticus in an attempt to drag the conversation back, again, to the main topic, “we have some technical resources amongst the Marines but this is basically a civil engineering problem and it needs a civilian-led solution. That’s where you come in,” he said, looking at Grimes and Smith, “since you’re the two people best placed to handle the technology and bring it online.”

  “And while you’re doing that,” said Denmead, on the principle that the best people to handle more work were those already loaded down with tasks, “we also need to get the ship flying again and then reprogram it to build useful villages, farms and outstations rather than the rather useless military-style bases it normally constructs.”

  She paused to look around the room.

  “That makes sense, people, doesn’t it? We repair the ship, move it to New Ashton, reconstruct what was destroyed and then deploy new fabricators to extend and improve our infrastructure, our civic spaces and our accommodation.”

  “And at the same time, we refurbish this base, which we’re going to name HMS Sultan in honour of long-closed facilities on Earth, and set it up as a staging and training post for the Marines,” said Atticus. “In the event of another invasion, we will already have a ready-made, fully militarised base of operations that should, with any luck, draw focus from the civilian areas.”

  “HMS Sultan, eh?” said Smith, sharing a glance with Grimes, “Well, I guess our first task is to get the local fabricators and manufacturing machines back on stream so that we can repair and rebuild. After that, Governor, Lieutenant Colonel, it’ll be over to you.”

  “Very good, Mr Smith,” said Denmead, sitting back in her chair and smiling benevolently at her councillors, “that will do very well indeed.”

  4

  Captain Warden stood on the bridge of Ascendant, watching the panoramic forward view monitors as the last shuttle from Albion departed after dropping off its cargo of supplies.

  “Flight control; report,” Lieutenant Commander Cohen said, in the distinctive, clipped intonation of a bridge officer.

  “Status green, Sir. All shuttles have now cleared our vicinity and Ascendant is ready to depart.”

  Cohen nodded, “Navigation, set course for NewPet.”

  “Course confirmed, Navigation ready.”

  “Helm, engage hyperspace drive,” said Cohen.

  The transition to hyperspace was smooth and controlled, like diving into cool water; real warships didn’t jerk, shudder or creak as they did in cheap holo-shows. Once the drive was engaged, space simply folded beneath the ship and it vanished from normal space, moving through hyperspace in much the same way that the conventional engines would manoeuvre the ship in normal space.

  The difference, of course, was the vast distance that could be quickly travelled in hyperspace. Unlike a wormhole, which allowed near instantaneous transmission of information, movement through hyperspace took time. Travelling at sub-light speed, the ship moved through the folds of hyperspace before exiting back into normal space at a distance that should have required them to travel faster than light.

  Warden didn’t pretend to understand the physics. In fact, hardly anyone in the universe understood how it all worked. All he needed to know was that that the effective rate of travel was many times light-speed and that meant they could reach another system in weeks or even days, rather than centuries or millennia.

  The fact that any wormhole larger than a pinprick would collapse without warning, at least with current technology, was both a blessing and a curse. Not being able to transfer ships mean that the Royal Navy couldn’t deliver a ship instantly to a combat zone; the upside was that the enemy couldn’t do that either, locking both sides into hyperspace or the slow vastness of real space.

  Wormholes were still the arteries of modern life, allowing near instantaneous transmission of data across the vast reaches of spaces. Though the energy requirement was huge, any planet with sufficient power generation could easily allow its citizens to communicate through wormholes, sending messages to family or friends as if they were across the street rather than in another solar system.

  “How long till we arrive?” asked Warden when the ship was comfortably underway.

  “About two hundred and ten hours,” said Cohen. Warden nodded thoughtfully. He was going to be busy. He now had a whole company to look after, and most of them were in fresh clones that were completely unfamiliar to them. They would need training if they were to use the clones to their full effect and they had fewer than nine days to get it done.

  Warden excused himself from the bridge and went to see how Colour Milton was getting on with the setup of their training facilities.

  ***

  Warden entered the former mothership hangar from one of the upper balconies and looked out at the work Milton had done on their improvised training ground.

  A wall of crates had been built on one side of th
e bay and bags of composite gel were being piled up as a backstop. That was the shooting range, positioned to ensure the rounds were not headed toward any of the access doors. You didn’t want someone taking a shortcut through the range when they thought it wasn’t in use; they couldn’t afford to put more strain on the cloning bays.

  The area to the side of the shooting range had been taped off to keep it clear of people and kit. On the other side of the hangar, mats had been laid out for unarmed combat practice, probably the most important topic of training for the newly deployed Marines. Martial arts, and even basic body movements such as throwing and catching a ball, were excellent ways to become accustomed to an unfamiliar clone model and the RMSC had long experience in quickly getting their people ready for combat.

  As Warden watched, a small flock of Harpies flapped their way across the combat mats, gliding down from the balcony to land awkwardly on the floor. These were the clones that required the biggest adjustments. The different reflexes, muscle strength, even bone density, all played a part in throwing you off kilter.

  The Marines seldom used winged troopers because they were just too specialised and while Ten had trained before in an RMSC clone with wings, it didn’t compare favourably to this Deathless version. The Harpy was lighter, faster and stronger than the RMSC equivalent, superior in every way, much though it pained Warden to admit it.

  The practical difficulties of flight training, even in Ascendant’s immense hangar, were huge. About all they could do so far was climb up to a balcony and glide back down, flapping their wings a little to eke out as much distance as possible.

  All the snipers and their spotters had been reassigned to Harpies. With luck, deploying teams in winged bodies would help them reach otherwise inaccessible perches and allow them to target enemies they couldn’t otherwise reach. The military advantages of being where the enemy didn’t expect you were huge, especially if you could just glide away from your perch once you were discovered.