The Mothership Read online

  THE MOTHERSHIP

  Stephen Renneberg

  Copyright

  Copyright © Stephen Renneberg 2013

  ISBN: 978-0-9874347-4-6

  All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal use only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy from a licensed eBook distributor. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Cover design by Damonza

  Author's Web Page

  http://www.stephenrenneberg.com/

  ALSO BY STEPHEN RENNEBERG

  The Kremlin Phoenix

  The Siren Project

  DEDICATION

  To Elenor,

  in appreciation of her

  intelligence, sensitivity and style.

  Contents

  Copyright

  Author's Web Page

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Nemza’ri awoke from a cold, dreamless sleep.

  She didn’t remember her transport cell’s rise in temperature, or the tingling sensation accompanying the fading of the stasis field. All she felt was an irrational fear of confined spaces, and an instinctive need to thrash wildly about inside her tiny space, to break free and escape into a tranquil blue sea. Fortunately, her muscles wouldn’t respond, giving her time to remember where she was and to relax with the knowledge that she would soon be released. It was always that way after revival; confusion, followed by fear and panic, then calm.

  A tiny needle pricked the base of her skull, injecting nano machines into her neck. The microscopic machines surged through her circulatory system, dispersing an antidote to the cellular suppressant she’d taken before the flight. A moment later, the outer aquatic membrane covering her bulbous amphibian eyes slid back as she regained control of her vision.

  Nemza’ri saw fully three quarters of the cell at a glance. She focused on its dull metal sides and the transparent surface above her face as she oriented herself. Her field of vision was wide for a predator, due to her eyes being set to the side of a streamlined, elongated head. Her extraordinary sight was an evolutionary signpost to eons past, before technology, when her species had been both hunter and hunted in a dangerous environment.

  She tried to move, but acceleration fields still held her firmly in place. Movement was always restricted inside the transport cells to protect the occupants from harm. Knowing she didn’t have long to prepare, she concentrated on breathing, and practicing the muscle tensing routines that helped return dormant tissue to life. The window above her face revealed her cell was already gliding through narrow metal canyons honeycombed with millions of octagonal sleep cells, each one capable of supporting its sleeping occupant for years, even if the ship lost all power. The cells were a safety precaution for mass transit, not a means of enduring long journeys, as travel times were relatively short irrespective of distance. Scattered through the vast network of symmetrical chasms were rows of tiny lights, their feeble illumination barely piercing the darkness. Occasionally, she saw the blue glow of a maintenance drone floating above, but no sign of any other cells being activated. She realized this was a midflight technical call, not their final destination. It meant she’d have very little time to recover before going back under, and would be aching for days after her next revival.

  When her transport cell floated into a docking port, the transparent surface overhead dilated, then acceleration fields lifted her up onto the platform above. A one-piece green jumpsuit floated in front of her, marked with her clan status and technical rating. While under way, because she was crew, she outranked even the Beldams, the female ruling elite, although in terms of the ship’s hierarchy she was just a low grade technician, qualified only to maintain the inertial accelerators used for in-flight attitude control. She’d long ago given up all hope of ever working on the superluminal drive. A brief stint in the knowledge tanks had proven to her, and to her superiors, that the required math for more advanced work was beyond her understanding. In human terms, her intellect towered above the most brilliant scientists ever born on Earth, yet compared to her own kind, she was of only meager ability.

  While she pulled on her jumpsuit, her cerebral implants relayed instructions informing her that a power fluctuation had developed in one of the hull’s maneuvering thrusters. It was a simple fault requiring a component swap, but as it was related to the ship’s safety, it had to be supervised by a qualified technician. Midflight revivals for mundane maintenance tasks always went to the most junior engineers which, in this case, was her.

  Nemza’ri stepped onto the gravity lift, pinging it with her biological sonar. Her sonic lobe was located beneath a smooth bulge protruding from her forehead, enabling her to sense objects many kilometers away underwater. It also served as an efficient means of communicating with the ship’s sonic receptors, negating the need for cumbersome control panels.

  The grav lift swept her towards the outer hull, where a maintenance drone waited with the replacement component. She pinged the far wall, sensing the subtle variation in metal density that marked the access port’s location. A narrow tunnel appeared in the wall, just wide enough for her and the maintenance drone to use in single file. She followed it in and began crawling towards the emitter housing lying just beneath the ship’s outer skin. Thousands of such emitters were placed around the ship’s hull, giving the enormous vessel astonishing acceleration at low velocity and precise positioning at the center of the spatial bubble during superluminal flight.

  When Nemza’ri was halfway through the outer hull, a warning siren sounded throughout the ship. She stopped surprised, knowing the Command Nexus, the ship’s guiding intelligence, would never have allowed her into the hull if there was any possibility of danger. The siren could only mean that the Command Nexus itself had been surprised, which should have been impossible.

  She hesitated, wondering if she should retreat back into the interior. Before she could move, the tiny crawlway closed around her as the ship’s armor expanded, sealing off every weak point in the massive hull. The maintenance drone was crushed to the thickness of an atom a meter from her face, while behind her, the way back into the ship’s interior vanished. The sides of the tunnel shrank in around her until they were just centimeters from her body. Hull sensors, detecting Nemza’ri’s presence, ensured a protective bubble formed around her while the Command Nexus prepared to deal with th
e unexpected emergency. If she’d been a senior officer, she might have ordered the ship to open the access tunnel, but at her lowly rank there was no possibility of overriding command protocols.

  Trapped in the dark, she fought her dislike of confined spaces by resuming her muscle tensing exercises in preparation for her return to the transport cell. She knew the Command Nexus would solve the problem and release her as soon as it was safe to do so. Minutes ticked by, but the crawlway did not reappear. She broke communications discipline and signaled a midlevel command system via one of her cerebral implants, but was surprisingly ignored. As a minimum, she should have been reprimanded for ill discipline. Even the bottom tier maintenance system, which she was authorized to access, told her only that all nonessential activities were temporarily suspended, but not why.

  The mighty ship shuddered, slamming her body against the hull wall. Dazed for a moment, she realized an acceleration field hadn’t caught her! It was incomprehensible that in a ship able to generate billions of such fields simultaneously, in any location, at any intensity, she should be thrown against a hard surface. The implications filled her with dread.

  For the first time in her life, Nemza’ri feared for the safety of the great ship.

  CHAPTER 1

  Major Robert Beckman raised his binoculars to study the North Dakota missile base through snow covered trees. In the darkness, he could just make out a chain link fence and a few isolated lights illuminating a concrete helo pad in front of three squat, rectangular buildings. There was no movement, no guards, no sign of life.

  All killed by NGFs, he decided.

  Intel estimated Non-terrestrial Ground Forces would have the birds fuelled in fifteen minutes and airborne two minutes later. Eliminating mankind with its own WMDs seemed strangely ironic to Beckman, even perplexing.

  Why not just blast us from orbit?

  The situation report he’d read at the start of the mission indicated political and military leaderships all over the world had been destroyed in the first minute. No surprises there, every orbital first strike scenario had anticipated that. Even so, the sitrep indicated Air Force One had taken off with a handful of survivors, only to be destroyed the first time it tried signaling US military forces. Beckman guessed no one had told the pilots about the paradigm shift. Only an idiot flies when the enemy has global air supremacy, achieved with infinitely advanced technology.

  Beckman motioned towards their objective, then the two women and eight men of the contact team rose out of the snow together and moved forward in two squads. Beckman led the first squad comprising the mission specialists, while Master Sergeant Henry Hooper led the force protection team in the second. Beckman was tall and athletic, with fair hair and a lean build while Hooper was shorter and heavy set, with a gravel voice. They’d served together in Delta, back when they’d had the edge in technology and firepower, but that was a lifetime ago.

  The team advanced in a skirmish line, dressed in white camouflage suits insulated to mask their thermal signatures, with weapons held at eye height sighting for targets. After months of hard training, Beckman knew the strengths and weaknesses of each team member. There was little to tell them apart in the snow at night, but Beckman knew Hooper’s professionals would take the lead in any fight, while his mission specialists would do the problem solving once the target was reached. Both squads were equipped with the best conventional weapons ever invented, but it was the “specials” that made them unique. They were smooth-skinned, silver weapons with child-sized hand grips and sighting mechanisms intended for compound eyes. The brains trust at Groom Lake had studied them for decades, discovering how to fire the alien weapons, but little else. Beckman found it sobering to know the world’s superpower had been reduced to the level of a mere scavenger, relying on equipment salvaged from a handful of crashed wrecks.

  Such was the futility of the situation facing mankind. There were only enough weapons recovered from Roswell, Berwyn Mountain and a handful of other crash sites, to equip one small team. It hardly seemed enough.

  Beckman started across the open ground towards the chain link fence. Ten meters out, he signaled to Timer Morie, the team’s combat engineer to place shaped charges on the fence posts. Timer ran forward and quickly blew a four meter gap in the wire then, before the posts hit the ground, Beckman charged toward the opening. His squad followed, while Hooper’s team took up covering positions behind them. The suppressed crack of a M95 rifle sounded behind Beckman as the sniper in Hooper’s team let off a single round. Almost immediately, a small fireball erupted above the eastern building, then bounced off the roof and rolled down onto the snow.

  Beckman sprinted past the helo pad as a small, dark disk rose above the central building ahead, firing red laser bursts at them. Almost immediately, the burp of an LSAT light machine gun shattered the still night air and the disk exploded, lighting up several dozen more disks rising above the roof. They were half a meter across, and emitted a soft thrumming sound as they floated forward. Both squads opened up with assault rifles as the disks swarmed towards them, emitting beams of red laser light. A female screamed behind Beckman, then a white suited form collapsed onto the snow covered ground, convulsing uncontrollably.

  “Too many for guns,” Beckman shouted, “Switch to specials!”

  While LSAT tracer laced the night sky, the rest of the team drew their recovered weapons. Beckman aimed his ‘midget’, the second smallest type, at the nearest disk and thumbed the firing surface. He relaxed his arm, letting the weapon push his hand to the side as it positioned itself for a perfect shot. Maybe it repelled Earth’s gravitational field, or maybe it was magic? No one knew. But the moment it positioned itself, a flash of light erupted from the weapon and one of the flying disks exploded in flames. All around him, bursts of orange and yellow superheated plasma filled the night as the team’s specials went to work, annihilating the drones. Beckman ran forward, pointing his special at the disks, letting it find and destroy its own targets.

  Every shot was a hit, every hit a kill.

  No matter how many times he’d seen the recovered weapons in action, they never ceased to amaze him. And frighten him. This was what they were up against, eons of technological development. In moments, the snow in front of the buildings was littered with flaming wrecks as more drones began to sweep in over the buildings.

  Timer began fixing a shaped charge to the central building’s main doors as Beckman and the two surviving mission specialists came up behind him. When double doors blew in, Beckman hurled a stun grenade through the doorway. The flash bang detonated, then he charged in to discover the entrance foyer was deserted. A security desk equipped with a bank of monitors occupied the center of the room, flanked by a pair of elevators leading down to the missile control center, and a locked door barring access to the fire stairs.

  Beckman motioned to the fire door. “Get that open!” There was no way he was going to risk getting trapped in the elevators. He clicked his mike. “Clear. Come in.”

  Hooper ran through the door, closely followed by Corporal Frank Tucker, the only other survivor of the force protection squad. They took up positions at the windows, firing their specials at the drones outside, each shot drilling a pinhole through the glass.

  Beckman did a quick count, discovering half the team was down, but at least they were inside. They might still knock out the fire control center, but it was going to be close.

  “This isn’t a door,” Captain Teresa ‘Xeno’ Bertolini said as she finished inspecting the entry to the fire stairs. Xeno was the team’s alien expert, a PhD with the highest security clearance of any member of the team. “It’s A-tech.”

  “Blow it,” Beckman ordered.

  Timer placed shaped charges on the alien technology door, and yelled, “Fire in the hole!”

  The foyer thundered with the sound of C4 detonating, but a glance told them the metallic surface was unaffected.

  “Stand clear,” Beckman said, then he fired his special into the d
ull metal surface, punching a tiny hole through it. The exotic material immediately contracted, perfectly repairing the puncture wound.

  “It’s a self-sealing hull plate,” Xeno said. She’d seen its like before at Groom Lake. “We’ve got nothing that will cut through it.”

  “Incoming!” Hooper warned, pointing at the elevators. The floor indicators were ticking over steadily, as the elevators climbed towards ground level.

  “Specials!” Beckman yelled as he pointed his weapon at the elevators.

  Timer and Xeno took up positions either side of him, weapons ready. When the elevator neared ground level, Beckman’s skin tingled as he felt his stomach leap into his mouth. He swallowed hard, feeling as if he was falling, no longer sure which way was up, then his feet lost contact with the floor. He tried keeping his special aimed at the elevator door, but the more he moved his arms in one direction, the more he drifted the other way.

  Hooper, floundering in the air, tried to fire his ‘fatboy’ special through the window at a drone hovering outside, but the weapon refused to discharge. “My special’s not working!”

  Dozens of red laser streaks flashed through the windows, striking the floating soldiers repeatedly. The room filled with groans and curses as electric shocks surged through their helpless forms.

  “Useless alien crap!” Hooper growled as lasers laced his body, triggering a series of sharp, electric shocks. He released his special, letting it float away as he drew his Model 500 Smith and Wesson revolver. The big .50 caliber pistol wasn’t military issue, but it could stop an elephant in its tracks.

  “No!” Xeno yelled when she saw him aim the big handgun, but it was too late.