Deathstalker 02 - Deathstalker Rebellion

mission. He sighed deeply and ran through his suit's built-in diagnostics again. Anything to keep his mind occupied. As soon as the Dauntless got close enough, he was going to be fired out of the torpedo tube toward the alien ship, and he wasn't looking forward to it one bit. Even if it was his idea. There was no entry port he could fly a pinnace to, and blowing a hole in the alien craft big enough to dock a pinnace might have all kinds of unpleasant consequences. That just left climbing into a hard suit and knocking on the door the hard way.

    Silence sighed again and wished he'd made time to visit the toilet first. The suit's facilities were efficient but primitive. The inside of his helmet had nothing to show him but the inside of the torpedo tube, and whatever displays he felt like calling up. It felt like he'd been stuck in the tube for hours, but the suit's timer, blinking officiously low on his left, insisted it had been barely twenty minutes. Silence wondered idly if this was what the inside of a coffin looked like, and then rather wished he hadn't.
    "Captain, Dauntless is in position," said the Second in Command's voice suddenly in his ear. "Launching now."
    Silence had an almost overpowering urge to say No, stop, I've changed my mind, and then pressure exploded around him, and he was shot out of the torpedo tube and into space. It was very dark, but the stars were very bright. They whirled around him in dizzy arcs, and then settled down as the hard suit orientated itself and its built-in computers locked onto the alien ship. The rocket pack on his back kicked in and nudged him toward the alien craft with a series of carefully considered bursts. The huge white ball hung silently before him, blank and ominous. This close, the tangled strands of webbing looked more like thick twisting cables. It also looked disturbingly organic. Alive. And quite possibly not nearly as damaged as it was pretending to be.
    He could see the damaged areas increasingly clearly as he drifted closer. They were deep, ragged pits in the sickly white surface, sinking deeper than even his suit's augmented vision could follow. The ragged edges of the broken cables hung limply, unmoving. Silence frowned and studied them closely. He kept thinking he saw some of them twitching just on the edge of his vision, but when he looked at them straight, they were still.

    He could see Frost, coming into view beside him, and his sensors told him the dozen marines were spread out around him in a narrow curve. Their presence was immediately reassuring, and he began to breathe a little more easily. He hadn't spent much time in actual space since his cadet days at the Academy, and he'd forgotten how cold and lonely it could be. Golgotha lay below him, great and golden and giving him at least a sense of up and down, but the sheer size of space was horribly intimidating. And lovely though the stars were, they were a hell of a long way off. It was also a hell of a long way down, but he was trying very hard not to think about that. If anything were to go wrong with his suit, he could end up dying in a variety of really unpleasant ways. But nothing was going to go wrong. The suit's diagnostics were fine, and its computers would get him to the alien ship far more safely than he could have managed on his own. At which point he would no doubt encounter some really disgusting alien life forms, more than ready to kill him in even worse ways. Join the Imperial Navy and see the universe. He smiled despite himself. He'd still rather be here than stuck helplessly back on the bridge, worrying about what Frost and the marines were getting into.
    He concentrated on the alien ship growing steadily larger all the time. It filled space before him, expanding like a small planet as he drifted toward its surface. The white cables were now thicker than a landing craft, impossibly long as they stretched away in each direction, and pocked with small and large holes, as though something had been gnawing on them. Silence found that thought disturbing. What the hell could the alien craft have encountered in its long travels through the Darkvoid that had actually tried to eat it? He put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on his landing.
    Silence and the Investigator and the marines drifted down onto the surface of
    the alien ship, like so many settling seeds on a forest floor, and collected on the edge of one of the holes the Dauntless had blasted in the outer surface of the