Ram-Jack

Chapter Three

A hard bang on the hull armor woke me. I snapped my cameras on with the same twitch that opened my eyes.

Something very black against the stars had my machine in a pair of pinchers. I closed my suit. Suit power had fully recharged. I could eject, but the camera facing the explosive route I'd take was filled with blackness. I'd plow into the hull of whatever held me with enough velocity to break all the bones I currently needed to survive.

I could discharge my remaining power in one jolt across the hull. That was my own modification. It would fry everything and leave me back on suit power again, but if that disabled whatever held my Ram-Jack, it would also bring another bogey coming on the double. I chose to play dead—nothing inside here but a dead pilot.

We didn't have a name for these aliens yet. Our first notice of them had been a pulsed recording from a science outpost in orbit around Tau Ceti e, the nearest exoplanet to our own solar system. That had consisted of about a hundred and fifty objects massing about twice the size of our Ram-Jacks and another object that was four times the mass of Battlecarrier Katrina. Mass recordings, that's all we'd gotten in that single pulse.

Either they had followed that pulse, or followed the return pulse of whichever idiot had received that message and called back toward Tau Ceti e for more data. They'd crossed the twelve light years fast. It was less than six months before an observatory at the edge of the Kuiper Belt picked up the same mass signatures. It had been enough time to build Katrina and her sister ship Wilma. The third battlecarrier, Rita, still sat in the yard orbiting the moon, a month or more away from completion.

We simply called them bogeys, and advanced out past the orbit of Uranus to meet them. Well, Katrina did at least, Wilma was limping back toward Ganymede station with a bad fusion plant.

"Lieutenant Kell, this is Captain Sinclair. We're withdrawing the Katrina to Ganymede station. Keep your suit com unit active and record everything you can, for as long as you can. Whatever you can get will save lives. God be with you, son."

I'll just list God right up there with luck—not to be trusted. After all, if God was with me, he'd just allowed a murderer to live while thirty-one innocent men and women had just been obliterated. Maybe he figured Earth had the most to gain, if I lived. Or, far more likely, he was siding with the bogeys. Shouldn't the best killers win?

And there you have the limits of my theological reasoning.

In the following moment my cockpit split open like a hammered coconut. Air briefly fogged my helmet visor before escaping to the void. A black cable the width of my wrist wrapped around me in a bruising grip. I had the foresight to slap the emergency harness release so it didn't tear me apart as it pulled me from the remains of my cockpit.

When the stars all went out, I knew I'd been drawn fully within the belly of the beast. The pressure of the cable withdrew from my chest and I caught myself against an uneven surface that shifted beneath my boots. I'd stepped on enough bodies to know what was beneath me without turning on my exterior lamp. Apparently it didn't matter if we were dead or not, the aliens were collecting all our remains. More than likely, another ship or two were collecting the Ram-Jack debris.

They wanted to know their enemy, a desire I found myself sharing with each passing second. I didn't really care what got sent back to the Katrina through my suit com, I wanted to meet these aliens. I wanted to size them up personally. Were they as deadly as their machines? That thought sent a thrill down my spine. Were they deadlier than me?

Some sort of atmosphere vibrated against my suit and visor as it rushed into the chamber. A moment later, yellow lights flared on. I was indeed standing upon the bodies, and pieces of bodies of my fellow Ram-Jack pilots. Blood smeared the black walls where it had bubbled out of the remains.

Several more black cables reached down from the ceiling and began sifting through the bodies. They took the dozen or so that were most intact and stuffed them through an aperture that irised open. I remained still. Once they'd done that, they drew the remaining pieces through a separate aperture then sprayed the chamber with what appeared to be soapy water.

It was still dripping from my visor when one cable tentacle wrapped around my helmet and another wrapped around my arms and chest. Then my helmet cracked and parted from my suit. Air that smelled of vinegar filled my nose.

We shared a similar atmosphere and somehow they were generating two-thirds of a gravity. That would make them either lazy, or larger than humans, with a degree of similar physiology. They had a thing for black. I couldn't tell what the yellow lights said about their eyesight.

I stripped out of the rest of my suit before the waving cables could begin tearing it off. Then I removed my undersuit.

"Get a good look at me," I muttered.