by Andrew Beery
“I take it you’ve both had busy days…”
Lori huffed and stuck her tongue out at me. I raised an eyebrow and turned towards Whiskers. To my amazement, he imitated my wife. The sight was ridiculous, and soon all of us were laughing at ourselves… it was the type of cathartic laughter that the utterly exhausted share.
When we finally settled down, Whiskers broached a topic that had been worrying him for the last several days.
“Let’s say we find that it’s safe to enter the system and we manage to make repairs. What then? It’s a good bet that whoever took those potshots at us in the Stanis system… also attacked the Faqqa. If the Faqqa's AI was also compromised… well, that could be a game-changer… and not in a good way."
I sighed and looked at my wife.
“Ya can’t play the hand until ya seen the cards that were dealt.”
2100.1207.0026 Galactic Normalized Time
A new race was discovered. They appeared to be a suitable candidate race for the great quest. It took several tens of their solar cycles and the extinction of a similar number of their species, but Eshbaal had finally developed and mastered the technologies required to bend this race to his will.
Chapter 4: Dog-gone-it…
Twenty-four hours later… after the crew had had a few hours to rest and caught some sleep… we reentered the Gilboa system. Our twelve probes were all at the designated rendezvous point. We downloaded their data and then spent the next two hours in probe recovery operations.
Mitty, Shelby, Mike and I analyzed the data that we collected. It looked positive, but then again looks can be deceiving as I was to find out later.
There were a few scattered power signatures but nothing to suggest any real presence in the system. The Defilers had been thorough in their efforts to eliminate the threat that the Saulites represented to their campaign to plunder the Galactic Order.
As we expected, the various LaGrange points had collected a large amount of debris. I had the Gilboa make her way towards the largest of the derelict weapons platforms in orbit around the planet that was this ship’s namesake.
Even compared to the Gilboa, the structure was huge. The weapons platform made me feel whimpy with an ‘h’ for emphasis.
As I sat in my command chair on the Gilboa’s bridge, I kept thinking to myself, about the firepower that it would have taken to defeat such a platform. On the other hand, the crew would have most certainly have been dead or dying because of the plague the Defilers had introduced… so maybe it wasn’t such a feat after all.
Forgetting the ethics… or lack-there-of… planetary genocide was a powerful weapon in and of itself. The mutagenic virus the Defilers had used on this world was beyond comprehension.
At one hundred kilometers away, I had Lieutenant Heinz bring the ship to a full stop and maintain a station-keeping orbit that would keep us at the same relative distance from the Saulite platform.
I stood up and began to make my way to the turbo-lift.
“The initial away team will consist of myself, Mitty, Commanders Spratt, McGraw, Sa’Mi and, of course, Colonel Morrison with a team of Marines. Dress of the day is combat armor. Shelby, you have command of the Gilboa. Try not to bust her up any more than she is.”
Shelby hurried and met me at the turbo-lift. She spoke to me in a soft voice so as not to appear to be arguing with a captain on his bridge.
“Sir, begging your pardon, but respectfully, you have no business on this mission. Your place is on the bridge of the Gilboa. I request permission to take your place.”
“I appreciate you concern Number one, but I have three reasons that make it imperative that I be the one to go. First, there is no one on this ship with more knowledge of negotiating the hazards of a junkyard in space then I do. Second, the Tas have given me access to command protocols that will allow me to deactivate any security systems that may still be operational.”
Shelby looked at me. I could see that she was mustering arguments against everything I had just said.
“Sir, you mentioned three reasons.”
“I’m the Admiral, and I outrank you.”
***
Our shuttle docked with little difficulty at a port near the main engineering section. Sensors indicated a large amount of residual radiation. The radiation covered pretty much the entire platform. Because the weapons platform’s reactors seemed intact, at least from an exterior inspection, it was a good bet that the Defilers had used some type of dirty bomb to neutralize the personnel on the platform. This is, of course, assuming anybody had survived the previous bio-terrorism that ravaged the entire Saulite civilization.
The size and number of D-Bombs required to bathe a structure as big as what we were looking at would have meant considerable collateral damage on the planet below. Its biosphere showed ample evidence that this was indeed the case.
Humanity had outlawed such weapons near population centers because of just such collateral damage issues – as a simple matter of ethics. It appeared the Defilers had no such compunction.
I sent Sa’Mi and the small team he had brought with him to the engineering compartments. Morrison sent a four-man escort with them. Their mission was a simple one. Strip the compartment of anything we could use to fix the Gilboa.
The rest of us made our way towards the battle bridge. Our mission was different. We were after information. The Saulites had engaged in the longest fight with the Defilers to date. There was every possibility that their log files contained a wealth of information on the enemy’s capabilities, tactics and strength.
Much of the ship near our entry point was open to the vacuum of space. This forced us to keep our armor sealed… although in point of fact, I had ordered everybody to keep sealed no matter what the environmental conditions.
I did this for a number of reasons. Experience at the boneyard had taught me that the stale air on a war-damaged derelict was nothing you wanted to breathe… it often included the smell of decaying combatants. This coupled with the radiation hazards, biological threats, and the icy-coldness of space meant that keeping sealed up was the wisest course of action – even if it was a pain in the ass to get around in the armor.
The good news was the Saulite weapons platform seemed designed from the onset to accommodate beings generally the size of humans. This was a refreshing change. The Gilboa had been retrofitted in many sections to more easily accommodate humans, but vast areas remained more suitable to the much smaller J’ni than your run-of-the-mill Homo sapien.
Our powered armor made quick work of the debris that blocked some corridors. The section of the ship we were making our way through seemed, at times, to be like swiss cheese. The Defilers had punched, literally, hundreds of holes through the platform’s armor once its shields had gone down. Knowing what had happened to the Gilboa after the mutinous AI had collapsed our shields meant I had some appreciation for what had happened here.
The biggest issue we had, was the amount of crap floating around. Since the gravity plating was off, every little loose screw, a shattered piece of plastic, or dead Saulite was floating free. It made visibility a bit of an issue. Fortunately, our armored boots had their own gravity plating that allowed us to walk easily.
Easily was perhaps an overstatement. Prior to meeting the Galactic Order, humanity's, far less capable, combat armor had used magnetic boots to get around a powered-down ship. This meant everything and its mother that was ferrous stuck to the boots. Eventually, this made the task of walking difficult; unless some time was taken to clear the debris from each of the aforementioned boots.
Our gravity boots made walking far more natural… but they attracted everything, ferrous or not. They were designed and engineered to repel items attempting to adhere to the top and sides of the boots. In addition, it was a simple matter to toggle the power on or off to gravity generators on each the boots individually. This allowed us to clean the boots of debris with relative ease. Our issue was there was so much stuff floating around that we were pausin
g to do this every few minutes.
After about a kilometer of trashed corridors, we reached a primary turbo-lift.
Whiskers had been hauling a portable thermal-decay generator on his back. It weighed about six hundred kilograms, but with our powered armor, it might as well have been a bologna sandwich.
The generator itself used the heat generated from radioactive decay. It could produce something on the order of ten kilowatts of juice. In the grand scheme of things, that wasn't much, but Mitty had assured us that Saulite systems, including turbo-lifts, were designed to accept such power sources in an emergency.
Mitty and Whiskers removed a plate covering a power distribution node next to the lift. As soon as they plugged in the generator, the control panel next to the lift lit up. We pressed the single call button. It began to flash slowly which meant the lift was on its way. So far, so good.
I was beginning to think this salvage mission was going to come off without a hitch… goes to show you how foolishly optimistic I could be.
There was an atmosphere in this section of the weapon’s platform. That was why we could hear the turbo-lift approaching. There was a definite grinding sound… as it made its way to our position. The noise did not give me a warm and fussy feeling inside.
I had a mental image of being stuck inside of a turbo lift that had failed in the middle of heaven-knows-where. It was a silly concern because our armor could easily tear a hole in the elevator and force an entry into the station from virtually any point. Fear, though, rarely respects rational boundaries.
Lori looked at me. I could see in her eyes that she was as concerned as I was.
“Is this thing going to be safe?” She asked.
I smiled. “Probably not.”
“Just what I was hoping to hear,” she answered sarcastically.
About that time, a haptic module in my comm-link vibrated signaling an incoming call.
“Riker, go ahead,” I said on a private channel.
“Sir, this is Sergeant Roak with the engineering team. Sir, you won’t believe what we’ve found down here. There are J’ni… hundreds of J’ni.”
“That’s not surprising,” I said, “Unless you are telling me they’re alive… that would be a surprise.”
“Correct Sir. They are all in stasis tubes that are running on some type of independent power source. As far as Commander Sa’Mi can determine, they’re all doing just fine. There is no atmosphere down here, so we dare not decant them.”
“Understood Sergeant. Relay the following to Commander Sa’Mi; He is to continue on his current salvage mission. I’m going to pull a rescue team over from Gilboa. My guess is these will not be the only J’ni we find. Riker out.”
***
Our trip to the bridge was relatively uneventful. The reason for the grinding noise in the turbo lift was immediately obvious when we entered it. The top right corner of the lift chamber was melted away. It looked like one of the energy beams, that had penetrated the weapons platform at various points, had managed to strike a glancing blow on the turbo-lift. It was amazing that it was still functioning at all.
We downloaded the system and sensor logs as well as the Commander’s log. This last was somewhat sparse as the woman who had been in command had been dead long before the actual attack had taken place.
Our next stop was the extensive medical facility. Here we found a few more J’ni as well as several dozen Saulites… all in stasis tubes. The Saulites stasis tubes were flagged with biohazard warnings. While these Saulites were technically still alive, they were infected and likely going to die shortly after they were decanted.
What was perhaps most surprising was that the Saulites all appeared human… or nearly so. In addition, most were female… very female. Of the twenty-six Saulites, only four were male. These four were a little bigger than the J’ni.
Our goal had been to learn what we could about the Defiler’s mutagenic bioweapons – the thought being; we may well need to defend against the same type of attack at some future point. That goal changed now that we had, what might well be, the last surviving Saulites in our care.
Lori wanted to bring all the stasis tubes back to the Gilboa. While I agreed with her reasoning that the Gilboa had better facilities for handling both the J’ni and the Saulites… I didn’t want to take the risk of the Defiler’s bio-weapon running amok through my ship. This was especially concerning to me considering the Saulites, especially the females, could have passed for human.
Was there a long-lost genetic link between our races that might make humanity vulnerable to the same mutagenic virus? I had a nagging suspicion I knew the answer. Did I mention there were times when I hated being right all the time? If it turned out, we were exposed; was there anything we could do about it?
It was a question that needed to be answered before any of us traveled back to the Gilboa. No matter how well we decontaminated our armor, there was a chance of something getting through and thereby risking the rest of the crew with a potential contagion.
Sadly, it turned out my fear was well-founded. It was two weeks before we realized just how much trouble we were in. I had a cough.
2100.1207.5113 Galactic Normalized Time
The Saulites were a warrior race. This presented both a problem and an opportunity. The collection of stars that formed what the various indigenous sentients called the Beehive cluster was dominated by a political entity called the Galactic order. Many of the artifacts that were secreted by the Mahanaim and other first ones were hidden on worlds located in this cluster. Selective genocide would make recovery of these relics orders of magnitude simpler.
Chapter 5: Sick Dog…
Tests on the genetic code of the Saulite corpses we had discovered on the weapons platform had yielded some surprising results. The Saulite's DNA used the exact same four nucleic acids as life originating on Earth. Within the Galactic Order, only the Archons were known to have similar DNA. However, not only did the Saulites share the basic components of our DNA, but there was also an 82.3 percent correlation between our DNA and theirs.
That may sound like a lot but its roughly the same as the genetic difference between a house cat and a human. I can tell you, as much as I like cats, the Saulites, especially the women that I had seen in the stasis tubes, were a hell of a lot cuter.
The startling similarity between the two races would need to remain a mystery for the time being. The repair of the Gilboa remained our top priority.
Thankfully, our salvage operations had been a surprising success. Not only did we have the Gilboa up and running at better than eighty percent operational efficiency; we had acquired three more fabrication units and about a hundred programmable repair bots to augment the sixty we already had.
Lori had revived the J’ni after Whiskers and Sa’Mi had gotten some of the weapons platform’s power systems back online. All told, there were about fifteen hundred surviving J’ni and twenty aquatic Kepsin in stasis. We kept those J'ni on the Saulite station for fear they might be carriers of the Defiler pathogen. It did not seem to have any effect on them, but that didn't mean they couldn't serve as unwitting vectors.
It turned out the platform’s power systems were not that badly damaged. The station’s senior J’ni commander decided to put his people in stasis and SCRAM the station’s reactors in the hopes that the Defilers would assume the platform was dead and break off their attack.
The plan had almost worked. Unfortunately, the AI that was meant to bring the station back online was damaged during the attack. It had the equivalent of what was once called ‘locked in' syndrome where the intellect was fully functional, but there was no way to communicate with the outside world.
The bottom line was, not only was the Gilboa being repaired but the J'ni were making steady if slow, progress on bringing the weapons platform back into operational status.
“I would not have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it myself,” Whiskers grunted as he stepped out of one of the transport shuttles we had be
en using.
As per normal, the shuttle and its occupants had gone through a thorough decontamination cycle. That meant I had to wait a few moments for him to climb out of his decon suit. The suits were far less bulky than the combat armor and allowed a sufficient degree of freedom that the engineers could actually do the work they needed to do.
As Whiskers finally stepped free of the suit, I asked the question that had been on my mind since he had first reported his discovery.
“Is the Skip-drive functional?”
“Well Dog, I have to be honest. I don’t rightly know. It certainly appears to be, but short of actually trying…”
“Why do you suppose they would have a drive of that type on an orbital weapons platform? It’s not like they are going to use the thing as some type of battleship.” The words came out a little scratchy. It felt like I was coming down with a cold.
“If’n I had to guess… I would say it’s to move it between where it was built and where it’s being deployed. The Saulites aren’t the GO’s engineers.”
I nodded. That made sense to me. The Galactic Order was far more compartmentalized in terms of what individual races excelled at than humanity.
“Well, Admiral Sir, this old man needs a bite to eat. Would you care to grab a sandwich with me?”
“Thanks for the offer,” I said with a small cough. “I think I’ll head over to the Med-bay and see if my wife can give me something for this cough.”
***
I knew there was a problem the minute I entered sickbay. Ten of the examination beds had patients in them… not with injuries but with colds. I hadn't seen that since… well, I hadn't seen that period. Each of the beds had an isolation field surrounding them. The idea was the shield would keep pathogens from escaping into the surrounding area.
Lori came over to me. She was in full isolation gear.
“I was about to call you. We are in serious trouble.”