28

Kyle awoke with a start.

His room was dark and empty. Avalon had the cubage to allow surprisingly large quarters for her commanding officer, but since he spent most of his time in the office he hadn’t bothered to put much in his rooms. Like, say, lamps.

The back of his neck tingled as if someone was watching him. The last time he’d felt this nervous for no reason, he’d turned out to be flying towards a hidden Commonwealth battlecruiser.

He heard a soft unfamiliar sound, and sat up, looking around his room. There should have been some light in the room, enough that setting his implant to night vision mode would allow him to see, but it was pitch black. His implants couldn’t process light that wasn’t there for his eyes to receive.

Feeling paranoid, he flipped a command to the ship to turn on the lights.

Nothing happened.

That moved the paranoia to spasms of panic. The last time he hadn’t been able to contact the ship’s computer, the old Avalon had suffered a critical Alcubierre failure. He breathed carefully, feeling the vibration of the ship around him.

Avalon was still running normally. He just couldn’t talk to her. It was almost as if…

The realization he was being jammed caused him to leap to his feet, dodging out of his bed moments before something slammed into the space he’d occupied. There was a horrible tearing sound as metal slashed through the sheets and mattress, but he couldn’t see anything.

Kyle didn’t carry a sidearm, but he kept one – and kept it right next to his uniform, in case he’d ever need it. Dodging against the wall, letting memory guide him, he found his uniforms just as a metallic mass slammed into the wall where he’d been standing with a crashing noise.

Just what was in the room with him?

His hand finally fell on the roughened metallic grip of the pistol. That same skittering sound headed towards him, and he dropped to the floor – dragging the pistol with him.

This time, he wasn’t fast enough, and fire seared across his shoulder as some kind of blade sliced through his shipsuit and into his skin.

Rolling away, wincing as the fresh wound hit the floor, he linked his implant into the pistol, checking its ammunition load, charge – and most importantly, light.

The tiny light buried in the tip of the barrel was astonishingly bright for its size, and it lit up his entire bedroom in stark relief. In the middle of the floor was a creation out of someone’s nightmares. It was dog sized, but resembled a mechanical cockroach more than anything else – a metal dome about seventy centimeters across, from which emerged all kinds of legs and blades.

It saw the light and charged him, blades flashing out on the end of long, articulated arms. Rolling aside again, he opened fire.

His first shots went wide, hitting the walls and fragmenting exactly as the frangible anti-personnel rounds were supposed to do. He still managed to put two shots on target, but they shattered on the metal shell in the same way.

Dodging another robotic charge, he slammed the manual release panel for his bedroom door. It ignored him, and then came apart in a shower of sparks as a telescoping arm slammed a metal blade into it, barely missing his head.

Then the robot slammed bodily into him, hammering him first into the wall and then onto the ground. He somehow managed to keep hold of the pistol and slammed it into the gap between arms as the thing reared up to strike.

There were seven rounds left in the magazine, and he emptied the gun into the inside of the thing. Spasming, its arms lashed forward again. His uninjured shoulder flared in agony as one of the blades went clean through muscle and bone to slam into the deck… and stop there.

A moment later, pinned to the deck by both the blade and the dead robot’s weight, Kyle’s implant finally linked back into the ship’s network.

“Medical and security to Captain’s quarters,” he ordered. “Medical and security to Captain’s quarters right the fuck now!”

Kyle wasn’t even pretending to be a good patient, so when Lieutenant Major Sirvard Barsamian entered the section of the Infirmary where Cunningham was treating him he waved her right over.

“Could you at least hold still?” the doctor hissed. “Yes, this is a very clean, very neat hole – but if you move while I’m working on it, it won’t stay that way!”

The Captain winced at the thought. His right shoulder had only been sliced open and was neatly stitched up, but the Surgeon-Commander had his left shoulder immobilized as he cleaned the wound and ran automatic nano-sutures down into the depths of the cut muscle.

Modern nanotech nerve-blocking, however, made it easy to forget that you were badly injured.

“Please tell me you have something, Sirvard,” he told the Marshal. “I don’t care to repeat tonight’s experience.”

“We don’t have much,” she replied. “But we’re pulling together data. We’re, uh, tearing your quarters apart, sir.”

“That’s fine,” he agreed quickly. “I’ll bunk in my office for now – lock my quarters as long as you need. Besides,” he glanced at the doctor beside him as he checked the time, “we are barely ninety minutes out of Alizon. I’m not going back to sleep.

“What do you know?” he finished.

“No-one exactly distributes assassination drone schematics,” Barsamian told him dryly. “So we can’t be certain of much about the drone. What I can tell you already is that we weren’t supposed to be able to say anything about it – it had a thermite-based self-destruct that would have incinerated the entire thing after you were dead.”

“Why didn’t it destroy itself when it failed then?”

“At a guess, the computer core had to order the self-destruct,” she explained. “You put four bullets through it, so it wasn’t ordering much of anything. Since the only weapon you had to hand shouldn’t have been able to kill it, I guess whoever sent it didn’t expect to fail.”

“Wonderful, I’m luckier than my intended murderer hoped for,” Kyle replied.

“What I can tell you so far is that drone was built aboard Avalon,” Barsamian said grimly. “Probably in one of the auto-fabricators engineering uses for small and mid-sized parts. Suffice to say, the design isn’t in our systems, but one of our people built the damn thing.”

“Our spy is appearing more and more like an assassin every day,” he grumbled. “Anything else?”

“It’s a nasty piece of work,” she allowed. “The shell would resist any small arms fire that isn’t armor piercing. No poisons or anything on the blades, but the blades allow for a silent kill that won’t trigger ship’s sensors – as soon as you started shooting at it, my people were on their way.

“We have no idea how it got into your quarters, and, shock, all of the cameras in your section of the ship were down for the seventy minutes prior to the attack,” she concluded grimly. “The latter is aggravating, since I had an alert added to the system for if we had camera issues… and the cameras happily reported they were working until we checked them.

“I do not like the degree of control this person has over our ship.”

“It’s pissing me off,” Kyle cheerfully admitted. “Unfortunately, right now we’re about to enter a system we know the Commonwealth controls, in hot pursuit of a madman who blew up half a planet. The disgustingly competent spy trying to kill me comes in at, oh, number three or four on my priorities.”

“You’ll forgive me if it’s the top of my list,” the Marshal replied. “We’ll dig into where the drone came from – it’s the best piece of evidence we’ve had so far.”

“Unless someone is actively shooting at us, let me know as soon as you find anything,” Kyle ordered. He paused and then sighed. “Get together with Master Sergeant Wa as well. I want a list from the pair of you of Marines you both completely trust to act as bodyguards. I don’t like it, but it looks like I need to concede on that point.”

“The Gunny already has guards on your office, your quarters, and this Infirmary ward,” Barsamian told him. “She and I will sort it out. And I will catch the son of bitch trying to kill people on my watch.”

“Whatever resources you need are yours, Marshal,” the Captain told her. “I don’t need to be watching my back when we go to war.”

He cringed as a moment of pain flashed through the nerve block, and he looked over at Cunningham.

“Are we done yet, Adrian?” he asked.

The doctor grimaced, and pulled the trigger on one last dose of nanotech filled foam covering the last piece of the wound.

“We’re done,” he confirmed. “Now, what you should do is lie down and not move for about twenty-four hours while the nanites work.”

“Ninety minutes from a Commonwealth-held system, Adrian,” Kyle said quietly.

“Right. So I’m immobilizing your shoulder,” Cunningham said bluntly, pulling an uncomfortable looking clamshell cast out from a cupboard.

“Hold very still.”