Lost Fleet Endeavour Chapter 9
Twenty-eight days later he was proved wrong. Grisholm sat in discomfort as he stared at a dead planet, taking in bruised clouds and frozen landscapes. It must have been a beautiful world once, sitting in the middle of the habitable zone with shining seas, soaring mountains and fertile fields. Now the oceans were heavy with silt, the mountains wreathed in ashes and the fertile fields lay fallow, dead plants left as withered fossils. The planet had been cut down in its prime, too young to die, a life cut short by tragedy, all its boundless potential wasted. But whether it was deliberate or natural catastrophe, that question remained to be answered.
"Marine shuttles are entering the atmosphere," the sensor-officer called out.
"Maintain vid-links," Grisholm said woodenly, "I want to see what it's like down there."
The man frowned, "We're picking up turbulence and heat tracks in the atmosphere, the shuttle's stealth coatings shouldn't leave any trace."
"They're older models and our sensors are cutting-edge," Grisholm reassured him, "To anyone else they may as well be invisible."
"We hope," Senator Sakai muttered.
Grisholm ignored that as he examined the images in the viewer. Endeavour's sensors were scrutinising the planet in exacting detail, surveying the damage. Top-side views of empty cities flashed in sequence, hundreds of kilometres apart, with monorails, factories and houses laid out in winding tracks. Old cities, allowed to grow beyond the rigid squares typical of new settlements. Cultures shifted and adjusted over time, changing the topography of urban landscapes, but few cities in the Alliance looked as contoured as these. The settlements on this world must be old, pre-dating the Alliance, among the first colonies of Old Earth. Their loss was a tragedy beyond measure.
Grisholm reflected on their journey so far. Since leaving Sol they had made a series of Jump through uninhabited systems. Nearly a month without incident, as they closed on the Covenant's border. Ancient maps had identified a colony here, called Avalon, and he'd looked forward to introducing himself, but when they arrived in-system they had discovered only ruins. Debris around the outer worlds and gas giants showed a chilling level of destruction, outposts and mining stations reduced to glittering rings around their orbits. Shipwrecks lay on airless moons and the primary world itself was wrapped in a solid nuclear winter.
Connors checked his readouts, "Marines are approaching objective Alpha."
"Put me through to Colonel Abebe," Grisholm ordered, "Colonel, do you have a visual?"
"Coming up on it now," the Marine reported, "No radiological markers, no bacterial agents, but the sight…"
"Hold on," Grisholm said as he pulled up an image on his personal screen.
Real-time data from Colonel Abebe's battle armour showed the Captain everything the Marine could see. The Colonel was leaning over the co-pilot's shoulder, peering out the shuttle's canopy. The angle was awkward but more than sufficient to reveal a vast crater carved into the landscape below, its ridges obvious from above. A massive pock-mark on the planet's surface, large enough to swallow a city whole. Data estimates from orbit had put it at 150 kilometres in diameter, but clinical analysis did nothing to convey the terrifying scale of destruction, the callous annihilation of a world that must have resulted.
"How many of those did we spot?" Sakai groaned.
"Destroyers are still circling the other side of the planet," Grisholm sighed, "But the regular placement of impact sites puts it about 100 impact sites."
"No chance they are natural?"
Grisholm sighed, "This evenly spread, all at the same time, that's deliberate destruction. Someone threw asteroids at this planet till its atmosphere choked on dust and the ecosystem collapsed. I'd hoped never to see such wanton destruction again."
That cut short the argument. During the war both sides had employed indiscriminate use of Kinetic Energy Weapons, slaughtering civilians in droves. The Syndics has started it, but the Alliance hadn't held back from retaliating. Endeavour herself carried plenty of KEW, but all her firepower combined couldn't produce this level of devastation. Only twice in a hundred years of conflict had the Alliance sought such total destruction, and it had taken whole fleets and vast commitment of ordnance that could have been better employed elsewhere, not to mention wrecking the industries and resources of the planet in question. Ultimately the Alliance had decided such proliferate obliteration had been counter-productive, and had only hardened attitudes to continue the fight.
"Proceed to Objective Beta," Grisholm ordered.
"Already on the way," Abebe radioed with a hint of reproach.
Grisholm frowned at the snappish tone, "Find that transmission, but use your initiative if you encounter developing situations."
Abebe said waspishly, "We will keep that in mind, sir."
Grisholm tried not to show his annoyance, he was acting like the worst sort of micromanaging Admiral, sticking his nose into assignments he knew nothing about. The Captain had control of the fleet, but his training was all ship-based, telling Marines how to do their jobs was redundant, they knew what needed doing better than he did. He resolved to sit back and keep his opinions to himself, but that was easier said than done.
Connors checked a reading, "Roundhouse reports she's completed her sweep of the larger gas giant, but no intact facilities were left. Payback reports the same from the smaller gas giant."
"Have the Light Cruisers return to the fleet, there's nothing to recover," Grisholm ordered bluntly.
"The Covenant did this," Sakai muttered.
"We don't know that," Grisholm refuted, "It could have been a civil war."
"A war that kills the planet you're standing on is insanity!"
"War is insanity from start to finish," Grisholm argued, "There were calls to detonate all the Hypernet gates in the final days of the war, destruction that would make this look like a mere spat."
Connor scowled, "I thought these Covenant types were supposed to be low-tech."
Grisholm sighed, "Nothing we see here requires advanced tech. Anyone with a spaceship can accelerate asteroids onto a collision course with a planet. A mass-driver could shoot rocks from half a solar system away, or you could just strap drive units to a rock and send it flying. If Avalon didn't have the means to deflect them then it hardly matters how advanced the attacker was, they only had to be better than the people down below."
"Coming into land," Colonel Abebe radioed.
Grisholm was about to order them to form a security cordon but hastily corrected, "Proceed as you see fit."
"We're coming down in a broad circle around the origin point, using buildings for cover. I don't want anyone shot from the sky."
Grisholm held stumm as the stealth shuttles landed, disgorging bulky figures onto the soil of Avalon. Myriad images popped up as data-links fed him the Marine's vision, letting him see what they saw. At first all he could see was the back of other Marines, clad in vac-sealed armour, boosting strength and speed. They were aggressive and bulky, and the weapons in their hands were lethal looking, but the environment interested him more. A city appeared as they spread out, empty buildings with gaping holes where windows had fallen out, their walls coated slate-grey by soot. Many of them were hollow, their interior floor rotting and collapsing, to leave hollow shells as a testament to a dead people. Everything was patterned by frost and icicles hung from gutters and signposts. The sun was a pale smear in the sky, barely penetrating the thick cloud cover. Analysts guessed this destruction must have occurred a generation ago and the planet's temperature was still degraded after all this time, he shuddered to think how bad it must have been in the days following the asteroid impacts.
The Marines advanced through the city, eight hundred of them sweeping out to examine buildings and check for survivors, but Colonel Abebe's unit was closing on the source of a radio transmission. They'd been picking it up since they jumped into the system, a repeating broadcast on a loop. No reply had been forthcoming when they tried to contact the sender, an automatic distress call, but one demanding investigation.
Abebe's unit crossed under a derelict monorail and closed on a large building. Like everything in this city it was abandoned, but this structure still stood out. The skeletal remains of a broad dome rose over a multi-storied complex, with large doors left ajar and many stairs leading up to the entrance. Lesser domes arose at the corners, each a hollow frame lingering long after the tile coverings had fallen away. The sight of it screamed senatorial history, to Grisholm's mind, a place for self-important politicians to pontificate and grow fat. Dignified and indolent, assured of their place in the universe, only to be proved impotent when the destruction fell.
"Presume hostiles!" Abebe barked, "Sweep and clear, don't assume there isn't a threat!" The Marines stormed the doors as if attacking a Syndic bridge, going in on a hair trigger, but there was nobody to fight. The interior was dim and cast in shadow, the floor piled with ashen snow, and bodies, lots and lots of bodies. They lay in heaps, stacked together in morbid piles, embracing in death. The cold air had preserved the corpses remarkably well, leaving them frozen cadavers.
Abebe paused, "They didn't die here."
"Explain," Grisholm ordered.
"This isn't how people fall when they die, somebody moved the bodies after they were dead. Some governmental types among the piles, but also workers and tradesmen and… and kids."
Connors frowned, "Whoever was left alive gathered the dead in this place. I guess the ground was too frozen to bury them."
"I don't think that's why they brought the bodies together," Abebe countered, "The corpses have been harried post-mortem. Knife marks… hacking pieces off… there are teeth marks too… even on the kids."
"Cannibalism," Connors grimaced.
"Desperation," Sakai sighed, "But it confirms this wasn't civil war."
"I don't follow," Grisholm sighed.
Sakai explained, "If this was a civil war, someone would have prepared, the government would have bunkers stocked with food and supplies, enough to last however long the nuclear winter was expected to last. If the survivors were forced to eat each other then nobody saw this coming. An outside force did this, someone who didn't hang around after."
"The Covenant," Connor spat.
Grisholm refuted, "Even if they did do this, we don't know why. There could have been a threat we can't see, a pre-emptive attack to stop a larger war. These people could have been worse than Syndic CEO's. For all we know a plague could have arisen and a forced quarantine wasn't enough to contain it or there could be alien menaces near the galactic rim we don't know about."
"Hard to imagine anything that justifies this," Sakai grunted.
"We don't know anything!" Grisholm refuted, "And our mission is to make peaceful contact with the Covenant, we can't assume malevolent intent. This colony was wiped out for a reason someone thought was justifiable, that's all we know for sure."
Connors started in his chair, "We're about to get a chance to ask them: a ship just appeared at the system's third Jump point!"
"How many?!" Grisholm demanded.
"Only one, four light-hours out, it matches the Corvettes the Covenant used at Sol."
"A patrol ship, conducting security patrols," Grisholm mused.
"We should contact them," Sakai argued.
"Too late, she's jumped out of the system again."
"They took one look at us and fled, doubtless to report our presence," Grisholm sighed.
There was nothing to be done, the Corvette had come and gone four hours before they'd even seen her, the light of her presence continuing on long after the ship itself had departed. If they gave chase immediately it would still be over a day till they reached the Jump point, so news of their arrival would reach the Covenant. Nothing Grisholm could do would change that fact, it seemed contact was coming, one way or another.
"What's going on up there?" Abebe called.
"We've been pinged by a patrol ship," Grisholm sighed, "But they didn't hang about to introduce themselves."
"We should return to the shuttles at once!"
"Negative, complete your sweep and find the source of the transmission. It will be days before anything happens up here. I want to be sure there are no survivors down there."
Abebe directed his Marines on, "We'll check for bunkers and safe rooms, but I doubt we'll find anyone alive after all this time. I'll see if we can find some computer cores the Code-monkeys can wake up, so we can at least learn why this planet was killed."
Grisholm leaned back and sighed, "We need to gather our ships and call a fleet Holoconference."
"You plan a new strategy?" Sakai asked.
"The situation certainly isn't what we expected; we need to determine our next steps."
Connors grimaced, "The First Blood of Terra hardly strikes me as allies we want or need."
Grisholm countered, "That isn't yet determined, but one thing is certain: the Covenant now knows we're coming."