The Alpha Protocol: Alpha Protocol Book 1 by Duncan Hamilton (read more books .txt) 📕

mercenaries who all looked as though they needed only the slightest reason to fill the creature full of bullets. It watched its ship being taken away, and Samson wondered what was going on in its head. It was probably used to winning against humans. Probably thought humanity was an inconvenience rather than a threat. Samson was glad to be the one highlighting the error in that.

He wondered what lay in store for the creature when he finally handed it over to his superiors. He didn’t reckon it would be pleasant, and despite everything, he felt a moment of sympathy for it. The thought of being captured himself and studied by its kind sent a chill across his skin.

‘Put it onto the yacht,’ Samson said. ‘We can go take a look around the crashed ship and establish an operations post and secure a perimeter. We should set up a portable scanner array if the intercom stays down. We need to be able to spot any more alien ships the moment they come into orbit. You can sort one out?’

‘Course I can,’ Smith said. ‘I’ll head back with Trevor and Nige to secure our guest, then I’ll get the fabricator working on the parts you’ll need. Ali knows his way around the wreck, so he can stay with you.’

‘Good,’ Samson said. ‘Let’s get to it.’

Smith started to walk away with the others. ‘It better not piss on my carpet, Samson,’ Smith shouted back. ‘If it pisses on my carpet, I’ll shoot it myself.’

Samson shook his head and couldn’t help but smile. It had been a successful day, and what they learned might give them the edge against an enemy that seemed to think it could push humans around as it pleased.

While there wasn’t much to the alien scout ship, the crashed vessel was an entirely different proposition. It was big. Bigger than the Sidewinder, and probably about the same size as a frigate in human terms—perhaps a hundred and thirty or forty metres—although it was difficult to tell with the hull shapes being so different. There was no way the SBB would be able to get it off the ground and into orbit, so defending the site for as long as it took was the only option.

Ali led Samson and Price down into the crater that the ship had left when it impacted on the surface. The ship was in remarkably good condition, considering the force that would have been required to tear up the hard-baked ground like that. It had the same reflection-less grey hull as the scout ship, albeit with some scratches and rents in it that revealed a silvery alloy underneath. Samson would have been very surprised if any hull material had been able to escape a landing like this without at least some scratches. It seemed the ship’s matte colour was a top coating of some sort—most likely possessing stealth or protective properties.

‘The opening is over this way,’ Ali said, gesturing to the obvious.

There was a large rocky outcrop some way back down the scar left by the ship’s crash. It looked as though it had been clobbered by an enormous wrecking ball, with a fresh face of unweathered rock exposed and large chunks of it scattered along the crash path. It had given a good account of itself, however. Samson reckoned it was responsible for opening the section of hull along the alien ship’s starboard side. It was a large rent, revealing the internal structure of several deck levels. It was a significant ship, and Samson wondered how many crew it had contained. A human ship of this size would have contained somewhere between a hundred fifty and two hundred, at a minimum.

‘You’re certain there’s nothing alive on board?’ Samson said.

‘We scanned every centimetre of it when we found it,’ Ali said. ‘Mary Celeste of the stars. Sort of. We found some bodies. A couple of dozen.’

‘Enough to run it?’ Samson said.

Ali shrugged.

It seemed unlikely that this ship could be operated with so few crew, but there was so much about this new race he didn’t know, there was no way he could presume anything.

They ventured in and were greeted with an interior very much like that of the scout ship they had just captured. There was visible damage in this part, as well as signs of the ship having been open to the elements for several weeks at least. Everything was covered in a fine layer of yellowish-beige dust from the planet’s surface. Despite that, it was difficult to say for sure how long the ship had been there. Judging by the recent arrival of the scout ship, he suspected not long. Unless…

What if the ship had been deliberately crashed as bait? It would explain why there were so few bodies on board. The scout ship might have been left behind to keep an eye on things. Maybe they got bored, or sloppy, which was why they were on the surface when Samson and the others arrived.

‘How much traffic moves through this system?’ Samson said.

Ali shrugged again. ‘Not so much now, but there was a bit of activity a couple of years back. A prospector found a vein of neodymium which started a bit of a gold rush. Turned out to be a one-off, and no one found anything else useful. Don’t think anyone’s been back since. Hard to get enough water here. Anyway, after all the fuss died down, the planet was written off, which is why Kingston was interested. Didn’t think anyone else would come here looking, but it was too dry for him too.’

‘Where were the diggings?’

‘Dunno. Didn’t look like there was anything in this region on the scans when we came in. Maybe on the other side of the planet? After we spotted the ship, we didn’t really look for anything else.’

‘What are you thinking, sir?’ Price asked.

‘A crashed ship with a skeleton crew? A scout ship keeping an eye on it, on a planet that there was a lot