The Lost Fleet Beyond the Frontier Invincible

“My comms are fine,” Geary said. “The problem was with me. I almost forgot that General Carabali knows her job a lot better than I know her job.”

As the Marines fell back toward the outer hull, the volume of space they had to defend grew larger as the diameter of the superbattleship’s hull grew. But Carabali was feeding in reinforcements and pulling her forces together into hedgehogs at intersections of the largest passageways, able to fire to all sides with heavy weapons as the bear-cows kept pressing onward. Under the concentrated fire of those heavy weapons, augmented by the fire of the Marine hand and shoulder-fired weapons, the tight ranks of the Kicks dissolved as they tried to drive into contact with the human invaders.

“How many of them are there?” a Marine yelled.

Some of the bear-cows had pushed through to the compartments where the initial penetrations had occurred, rushing the combat engineers defending the bridgeheads there. The combat engineers lacked the heavy weapons of the line Marines, but they made up for that with demolitions and other tools of their trade. Geary winced as he watched the havoc wrought by the engineers as they wiped out the Kicks coming against them. Those portions of the enemy ship would yield little of use to those seeking to learn more about the bear-cows and their technology.

Geary, appalled by the carnage, couldn’t take his eyes off the screens where the bear-cows pitted their numbers and their hand weapons against the concentrated firepower of the Marines. In some places, the Kicks actually managed to reach the hedgehogs, hurling themselves at the perimeters in solid ranks that threatened to submerge the Marines. Geary saw Marines being knocked down despite the superior strength of their combat armor, some of the Marine lines wavering as the hedgehogs were compressed on all sides. Packed in ever tighter inside their defensive perimeters, the Marines were unable to move, unable to do anything but keep firing with weapons glowing from waste heat.

Carabali had been watching, though. More Marine reinforcements had been arriving, leaping from shuttles into the improvised air locks on the outer hull, being brought inside the hull as fast as possible. Those Marines were formed into shock teams, who now stormed into the passageways leading to the most heavily beleaguered hedgehogs, catching the attacking Kicks from behind.

One by one, the hedgehogs under the heaviest pressure were relieved, the Marines pushing out to form wider defensive positions and keep the bear-cows from being able to concentrate against isolated strongpoints.

The assaults against the Marine positions faltered here, then there, then at each point where the Kicks had surged ahead. The attacks paused, leaving a sense of a foe taking breaths and trying to regain enough strength to continue the fight. Before that pause could extend, Carabali issued new orders, and everywhere the Marines moved out of their hedgehogs and defensive lines, blowing holes through bulkheads to bypass passageways choked with dead bear-cows.

“Tough bastards,” a Marine said as he skirted a solid wall of unmoving bear-cows, their armor torn, blobs of purplish blood filling the air in the absence of gravity.

“Good thing there weren’t more of them,” one of his companions agreed.

“There are more of them,” their sergeant barked. “Keep your weapons ready, your mouths shut, and your eyes sharp.”

As the Marines moved farther into the ship, they encountered scattered pockets of Kicks, who hurled themselves forward in hopeless, desperate attacks that ended only when the last of them was dead. Geary watched the symbols of the Marine units spread back through the superbattleship, then onward past the points where the crew had counterattacked.

“What the hell?” a lieutenant asked as her unit entered a very large area near the center of the ship, a vast compartment whose ceiling soared six meters high. But the deck of the compartment wasn’t a deck, it was vegetation, row upon row of crops set into growing containers, the tops of multiple stems on each plant heavy with seeds or fruit or maybe something that was both seed and fruit.

“Food and oxygen resupply combined in one,” a sergeant remarked, pulling himself down to examine a long line of growing containers. “My father worked on a farm like this in a sealed city before Huldera Star System was abandoned. And, unless I miss my guess, this is how those bear-cows recycled at least some of their waste products, as fertilizer. Good things these troughs are sealed so stuff couldn’t float away when the gravity went off.”

The sergeant’s squad made noises of revulsion, suddenly taking great care where they put their hands and feet.

More units stumbled across similar compartments, then one platoon sounded an alert that drew Geary’s attention. “Lieutenant, I think we found a control station. It doesn’t look big enough for a full power core.”

“How would you know, Winski?”