by Andrew Beery
The Colonel seemed confident. I wish I shared his optimism.
The trip to the roof was problematic. It seemed my escape had prompted a massive response. Mike had passed me a small handgun that used a small linear accelerator to fire a magnetic dart. It was not particularly powerful and would be shrugged off by even the thinnest armor… but it was virtually silent.
Merab and he both had their own larger weapons. Again, not all that powerful but absolutely quiet. In my mind, I had questioned the wisdom of providing the Saulite doctor with a gun. I supposed that if she was still under the influence of her mental conditioning, she would have already taken the opportunity to turn on us. At a certain point, you just have to trust people… especially when they’ve just risked life and limb to rescue you.
We ended up taking out six groups of searchers. It seemed like the last three groups had been converging on our location. My guess was the trail of bodies we were leaving was giving away our destination. This did not bode well for the home team… well I guess technically we were the visitors but hey… you get the idea.
We turned one final corner and saw the hatch that led to the roof. It was open. I looked towards Mike. It seemed unlikely that the experienced Marine would have left it open.
He confirmed my suspicion by shaking his head.
I knew our egress was not going to be as easy as Mike was thinking. It seems it’s a chronic problem I have… being right as far as my gut feelings go.
My fears were confirmed as I stepped onto the roof and saw about ten clones, including three copies of myself, pointing weapons at our now fully decloaked shuttle.
2100.1207.2047 Galactic Normalized Time
The AI known as Ish-Boshet was as pleased as his emotive subroutines would allow. A fourth and fifth clone templates had been developed from recently acquired new stock. They promised to be productive additions to his pool of available resources.
Chapter 16: Dog Pound…
There is a guy in the Old Testament who once wrote down a series of proverbs that sought to give advice to anyone smart enough to pay attention. One such gem of wisdom was…
‘The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the foolish keep going and pay the penalty…’
I bring this up because I was clearly one of the latter and not one of the former.
“Three to one odds,” Mike muttered softly. “I don’t like those numbers.”
“Me neither,” I agreed. “Let’s attack.”
Rather than debate the issue, I charged out of the door and began firing with a certain amount of gleeful abandon. I nailed three of the neander-thugs before they even knew they were under attack. That cut the odds to almost two to one. I’d count that a nice improvement. I’m not sure Mike and Merab would agree. I don’t know. It might have been the scathing looks the two of them were casting my direction.
In fairness to myself, I had a plan. True, it was a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants plan, but that’s often when and where I do my best work.
First, the bad guys had all been facing away from us. I couldn’t know how long that would last, so I took advantage of the opportunity. Second, I was now about twenty feet from the good doctor and Marine commander. The four remaining neander-thugs and my three doppelgangers would now need to defend from two directions. I thought it was a good plan. So much for my thinking processes.
Mike yelled, “Give us some cover. There’s a group making their way up the staircase.
“Crap,” Now it seemed we were the ones defending from two directions. I poked my hand around the corner of the whatever-the-hell-it-was I was crouched behind and began to squeeze off some rounds.
I got about three shots off when I almost lost my hand. One of the crack shots on the other side, probably one of the other me’s managed to actually hit the gun I was holding.
As a point of reference in case you ever find yourself in a similar situation… holding something and having it shot out of your hand is a profoundly uncomfortable experience. I had to look twice to ensure I still had the standard issue five fingers. One of them was bent at an angle that was not normal, but it was most definitely still attached… in roughly the right place. Did I mention the ‘profoundly uncomfortable’ piece?
“Get ready to run for the ship!” Merab yelled. She was fiddling with a device on her sleeve that I didn’t recognize. It definitely looked to be of Defiler construction… as was the shuttle for that matter.
The next thing I knew I heard a deep thud and felt a concussive blast of air coming from the general direction of the shuttle. I turned and saw something that looked like it came straight out of a holovid… ten airborne bad guys, including three very dead ones, being tossed like rag dolls away from the ship.
I knew immediately what the good doctor had done. She had remotely instructed the ship’s environmental shields to expand several yards in every direction. Normally these shields deflected small rocks and whatnot from hitting the ship as it traveled at near relativistic speeds. It turns out they are equally effective at deflecting doppelgangers and neander-thugs. Who knew?
Mike was engaging the newcomers who were attempting to climb the stairs we had come up a few moments before. Merab and I dashed to the shuttle as its entry ramp extended. I really was going to have to get myself one of the nifty remotes. I had a collection of them that I used for my holovids. This would make an interesting addition… of course, that just meant I’d lose it more often than not.
“Mike, we’ve got you covered,” I yelled from the top of the ramp. “Get your Marine butt over here ASAP.”
Say what you will, Mike was good at following orders… especially when he wanted to. This was definitely one of those times he wanted to.
Merab was busy bringing the ship’s flight systems online. I kept popping rounds in the general direction of the stairwell that the Defilers were attempting to use to gain access to the roof. I say ‘in the general direction’ because I was using my left hand to hold and fire the gun… my right hand being well and truly buggered up by a miscreant clone.
Unfortunately, the neander-thugs and Saulite B’Elanna clones must have realized that my aim wasn’t up to snuff and they charged the egress. I managed to wing one, but six of the others made their way onto the roof and cover. Even with Mike’s help, we were not going to hold them back long.
“I hate to be a pesky passenger Doctor, but an immediate takeoff would be advisable at this point. We have visitors on the way that I’d just as soon not join us for our little sojourn.”
“Hold tight Admiral! This is going to be a bit of a bumpy ride.”
The hatch closed at some signal from the bridge and at about the same time the shuttle leapt forward and up.
It was indeed a bumpy ride. Sadly, with a bum hand, my ability to ‘hold tight’ was somewhat constrained. I managed to avoid more broken bones, but that was pretty much it.
I’m not going to lie. Being shot at while in a pretty much defenseless shuttle is not my idea of a good time. We took a number of hits to our port thruster and another to our primary power distribution node. Both were inop by the time we made orbit. The power distribution node was my biggest concern
The secondaries could handle the load, as long as we didn’t get fancy with our power requirements… and as long as we could avoid taking too many more hits. Fortunately, most of the shooting was coming from ground-based installations. Once we hit orbit, we were out of range of those defensive systems.
Orbital platforms, however, were another matter. It seemed the Defilers erred on the side of ‘shoot first and don’t bother with questions later.’ It seemed like every bloody piece of hardware in orbit around Tarf had a gun on it. And every single one of those guns was intent on taking potshots at the tub I was riding in.
The tub in question was the newly renamed GSS Jan Van Amstel. Don’t ask me how that name got picked… it's above my pay grade, and I’m at the top of the pile when it comes to pay grades.
Apparently, in WWII there was some boa
t with that name that managed to hide in plain sight by disguising itself as an island. It was a neat trick, but there were not a lot of palm trees in space.
The Amstel had our most advanced stealth technology in it… stolen and enhanced from the Defilers. I guess in some weird way the name made sense. To be honest, I tried not to think about it too much. The Amstel didn’t survive the Second World War. Call me an optimist, but I was hoping for a better outcome this time around.
“Admiral,” Mike called down from the small shuttle’s cockpit. “We have ourselves a bit of a problem.”
“Ya think?” I barked back.
“With only one thruster we’re not going to be out racing anybody and sure as shooting they will have attack craft in our AO in short order.”
“How’s our cloak?” I asked although I pretty much already knew the answer.
“Dicey. With the distribution nodes fried we can have partial thrusters or the cloak… not both.”
I slowly worked my way up to the cockpit. There was room for a pilot and co-pilot, and that was about it. Merab and Mike currently occupied both seats. I poked my head into the space between their seats. Merab was the primary pilot, and from what I could, she was doing a hell of a job.
The key was to keep the ship in that sweet spot where none of the orbiting hardware that the Defilers had up here had a direct line of sight. It was easier said than done. She was dealing with three-dimensional space with satellites moving at different speeds and in different orbits.
Occasionally there simply would not be a solution, and the result would be a shot aimed in our direction. So far, our navigational shields had held up, but that was only because the hits had been glancing ones. Sooner or later our luck would run out.
Of course, the other problem was that by playing dodgeball in orbit, we were burning through fuel like nobody’s business. There was a limit to how long that was going to last as well.
I shifted my position to get a better look at the controls in front of Merab. I was looking for something specific, but given that this was originally a Defiler designed shuttle, I wasn’t sure I would recognize what I was looking for.
Mike saw me inch my head in a little, and the marine tried to surrender his co-pilot chair to me, but I waved him off. He must have seen me grimace as I moved my injured hand to fast.
“You seem to be setting a record for breaking bones lately,” he said with a grin.
“Tell me about it,” I grumbled back. “Tell me about this ship Merab. What can it do?”
The Saulite doctor took a moment from handling the controls to look at me.
“Do you have a plan, Sir?”
“I might,” I said with a grin.
***
Thirty minutes later we were safely sitting in a Lagrange point along with several thousand small rocks and a Defiler monitoring satellite. Now you might be asking yourself, ‘self… how did they get there and why was the monitoring satellite not raising a ruckus about our presence in its little gravitational love nest?’
Those were fair questions, and they deserved an answer. Lagrange points are gravitational oddities surrounding most moving large gravitational bodies in space… especially if they had large moons associated with them. Basically, they were those points where gravitation forces from every direction canceled each other out. You could think of them as gravitational wells, but you would be wrong… most of the time.
The mathematics and geometry associated with Lagrange points mean that there are typically five of them when you have two large gravitational objects in orbit around one another… say a planet around a sun or a large moon around a planet. Here is the thing… three of these five Lagrange points are unstable.
Think of them as needles with very large heads… move too far in any one direction, and you fall off the head of the needle. Lagrange Points 1-3 fall, pun intended, fall into this category. Lagrange points four and five are different. These guys form a gravitational well. Think of a bowl with a marble in it. The marble tends to stay near the bottom of the bowl even if you shake it up a little. This means anything coming near L4 or L5 tends to settle into a nice comfy orbit… and by anything, that includes rocks, dust, scraps of metal floating about and beat-up shuttles.
The Amstel was currently sitting in L4. We had cloaked and used attitude control thrusters, basically compressed gas, to inch us into a position where we would drift into the point’s gravity well. Once there we pulled a bunch of palm trees around us and hide in plain sight. Oh… in this case the palm trees were thousands of years of accumulated debris.
We were safe for the moment, but if we were going to make good our escape, we would need to repair both the thrusters and the power distribution nodes. This presented a problem. Our robotic buddy who was sharing our comfy little gravity well was one casual sensor sweep from detecting us. Any activity outside the ship… say things like plasma welders… was likely to draw unwanted attention.
“We’re going to need to take care of our friend out there,” I said to Mike and Merab as the doctor was setting the bones in my fingers and using a handheld tissue regenerator to cause the bones to fuse faster.
Do you remember my earlier comments about that BS I had heard in boot camp concerning pain being our friend? I still didn’t buy it. Just say’n.
“We could fly over in EVA suits and plant some C4,” Mike offered.
Merab shook her head. “My comms are showing regular traffic to and from that monitoring platform. It’s continuing to report all clear and responding to requests to monitor specific regions of space. Besides, our thruster packs would almost certainly light us up like Maga Trees.”
“Taking it out is likely to raise some red FLAGS,” I added as the good doctor suddenly popped the last of the fingers back into place. I had no idea what a Maga was, but I was guessing in this instance it didn’t represent anything good.
On a side note, I have to admit, once she was done working on my hand it felt much better. I was still going to have to favor it for a while, but at least I could use it in a pinch.
I turned to look across the small common room that formed the bulk of the interior space within the shuttle. My eyes floated toward the cockpit and the communication systems. My mind began to work on another idea. Mike and Merab must have seen the wheels turning because the both got worried looks on their faces.
I smiled as a Bible verse my mother used to say to me suddenly popped into my head. And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?
2100.1207.2047 Galactic Normalized Time
KtanTo-net Ish-Boset looked out over the vast array of clone tanks. Her master was preparing an army. The massive AI would soon be in a position to carry out Master Eshbaal’s grand integration plan. There was a twinge of remorse in the clone’s eyes. Her people and those of the Galactic Order and its surrounding star systems might not survive the process of integration. It was not something she wanted to see… but what was a clone to do?
Chapter 17: Sneaky Dog…
There comes a time in every man’s life when you just play the card’s you’ve been dealt and hope for the best. This was definitely one of those times. The Amstel was essentially powered down and surrounded by as many rocks as could be covertly gathered to cover her.
Mike, Merab and I were all in Defiler-style EVA suits. These were the same type of cloaking suits the Saulite doctor and her clone sisters had used to infiltrate the Gilboa. I had to admit, there was a certain amount of irony involved in using their own tech against them.
Our assault strategy was a simple one. We were going to throw rocks. Very small rocks but rocks none-the-less. Now any rational person would question the wisdom of using rocks to attack one of the most advanced pieces of alien hardware known to man but then again, if we are talking ‘rational person’ – I’ve always been somewhat of an outlier.
In point of fact, we were not actually throwing the rocks at the monitoring satellite. We were throwing rocks away from it. If yo
u are curious as to why then I would refer you to Newton’s three laws of motion… especially the one involving equal but opposite forces. Throwing the rocks away from the Defiler satellite had the effect of slowing thrusting us, the throwers of the rocks, in the general direction of the satellite in question.
Cloaked and with no visible thrust plume, we were betting we could sneak up on the scanning array. To be fair, I’m sure the Defiler platform saw the rocks we were using to adjust the vector of our approach, but I was also betting that it’s more limited onboard AI was programmed to ignore the veritable plethora of small rocks floating around this particular region of space.
We were radio silent and most of the suit-based hardware, except for the cloak itself, was shut down… including most of the suit’s environmental systems. The rebreather was based on simple chemistry, so it required only a handful of milliwatts to operate. In short, we were blind and deaf beyond what our mark-one optics could tell us. I had no way of seeing where the other two were and could only hope they were on course.
I could see the target ahead and thankfully it was growing steadily bigger with each passing moment. I guesstimated I had about five minutes left before I reached the objective. Each of us carried a small service module.
These units were designed to be used by neander-thugs to do onsite repairs on the platform’s systems. More importantly, they were designed to function automatically and independently – let’s be honest, neander-thugs are not the sharpest tools in the shed. Our particular service modules had their programming tweaked by yours truly… hey, that 180 IQ had to be good for something. The new programming included routines designed to mimic normal transmission acknowledgments and to report bogus data… data that did not include insignificant trifles such as damaged shuttles in the process of repairing themselves.
I was sweating profusely. The environmental systems normally helped shed body heat out of the suit. The vacuum of space was one of the best insulation systems ever designed by the hand of God… translation, every calorie my body burned that produced heat stayed in the suit. Did I mention it was hot?