by M. D. Cooper
Heather paused, hoping the right people were listening to her broadcast, before drawing a deep breath and continuing.
“That’s right; they want you to think that they’re here for resupply after a successful engagement, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. They’ve been routed, and they’re here to pillage your system before retreating back into the empire.
“Don’t you fret, though. We’re here to stop that from happening. The Nietzscheans are going to fall, and the Central Allies are going to put them down. We’ve beat them twice in the Albany System, crushed them and stole their ships in the Hercules System, and we’re going to finish the job and wipe them out here.
“Marauders know what Nietzschean scorched-earth retreats look like. You don’t want that to happen in Sepe. You outnumber these bastards, so gird your loins and join us!”
Heather killed the transmission, and Garth chuckled.
“ ‘Gird your loins’?” he asked.
“I was adlibbing it,” Heather replied. “Any word from the station? Other than all the yelling so far.”
“Not yet,” Ona replied. “Wait…this is weird. The emergency alert system on the station just broadcast an all-clear.”
Heather watched as Potter fired the Fury Lance’s railguns at a nearby Nietzschean destroyer, breaching its shields and tearing away a chunk of its hull. “Sounds like Rika and the Kellies are getting shit done.”
Railguns slid out of housings on Ursa Station and began firing on Nietzschean ships—specifically ones without Marauder teams aboard.
Further out, Klen and Buggsie’s destroyers were engaging the orbiting Nietzschean ships, striking out at targets of opportunity while remaining stealthed.
Heather felt optimism blossom in her heart as she noted that over thirty Nietzschean ships were already flagged as disabled on the holodisplay. Sixty others had undocked, but of those, forty had Marauder teams aboard. The real threats were from the ships orbiting the nearby moons, and the Seppies around Crag. While they didn’t have the firepower to breach the stasis shields that Rika’s Fury’s ships sported, they could take out the ships the Marauders were capturing.
They were still balanced on the knife’s edge; things could easily go either way.
“Got a call for you,” Ona called out. “Well, two. One from Admiral Fels, and the other from a guy named General Saz.”
Heather had studied the available data on the Seppies military and knew that Saz was a five-star general. Just the sort of person she wanted to get on the horn.
“General Saz,” Heather said aloud, sending a full visual from the Fury Lance’s bridge. “Glad you got my message. We’re going to do our best to take out every Nietzschean ship in the Sepe system, but we could really use your help.”
As she spoke, a stout man of middling height appeared before her. Heather wouldn’t go so far as to call him overweight, but he was certainly stocky. His stature, however, didn’t hide the sharp look in his narrowed eyes.
“Captain Heather? Of the Marauders?” he asked.
Heather nodded in response. “That’s me.”
“You’re a mech.”
Heather looked down at herself, mouth hanging open, eyes wide. “What the hell! When did that happen? How didn’t I notice?”
“I don’t appreciate the tone, Captain,” the general growled. “I’m ordering you to stand down. The Nietzscheans are our allies, we’re not going to attack them. If you don’t cease fire immediately, we will open fire on your ships.”
Heather shook her head, having trouble believing what the man was saying.
“Didn’t you see the dispatches we forwarded? The Niets are going to burn your system to a cinder!”
“I have Admiral Fels on comms, and he assures me that no such action will be taken, or has even been contemplated. It is you who are tearing this system apart. The debris field you’ve already created around Ursa Station is going to be a nightmare to clean up—if it doesn’t destroy the station first.” General Saz’s eyes widened as he took a step forward. “Now cease this aggression immediately!”
“Shit,” Heather killed the comm and glanced at Alice. “We can’t take out the Niets and the Seppies at the same time. What do we do?”
Alice snorted. “Oh, now you want my advice?”
* * * * *
Chase led them down the passage, which was half-filled with pipes and conduit and went on for what seemed like forever. He was starting to doubt his instincts, when the narrow space finally dumped out into a larger corridor.
He pulled himself through and took up a position behind a solid-looking crate as the rest of the fireteam piled out after him.
Chase said as the team took up positions on either side of the AHC’s entrance.
Fred chuckled.
* * * * *
No one spoke for a minute, and then Niki announced,
Irek made a strange groan-like sound over the Link.
the AI laughed.
Rika accepted the connections Niki had passed, and tapped into scan first, seeing the Fury Lance pulling away with her tw
o cruisers accompanying it. The cruisers were taking some fire from enemy ships, but most was directed at the Fury Lance.
Dozens of vessels were firing on the ‘Lance, its stasis shields flaring brightly as beams and kinetics smashed particles against the impenetrable shield.
She tapped the comms and listened in on the Niets, and then the Seppies, surprised to hear them working together.
Well, that was always a possibility, Rika thought before making a connection to the Fury Lance.
Rika closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. OK…this is not going as well as I’d hoped. She took a moment to consider her options before replying.
The realization that she could lose this engagement hit her full on. What are we doing trying to take a system with a handful of ships? Still…at the heart of it, this was Tanis’s plan. Come on, the Admiral wouldn’t have sent us out here to die.
The thought reassured Rika, and she tapped into the station’s comm systems. Once in, she hopped onto the Nietzschean battle network and found her way to the sixty ships her Marauder teams were breaching. The first ship she reached out to was the one Leslie’s team had boarded.
Rika couldn’t help but laugh at the confusion in Leslie’s voice.
The AI responded after a moment.
Rika felt a twinge of worry at her ability to breach the Nietzschean comm relay. A part of her wondered if the things Finaeus had done to her brain had created some sort of back channel between herself and Niki.
Am I accessing the same general data pool as Niki?
She’d know if that was the case… Even an L0 human brain could tell the difference between organic memories and external data storage.
Right?
And the thing she’d done wasn’t something Niki had tried….
She pushed it from her mind as best she could and reached out to more and more of the Marauder teams until she’d brought all sixty of them together.
The data flow turned out to be more than she could manage—what, with her and Niki both sharing the same hard-Link and routing through Irek.
Rika suddenly realized she was staring right at a stack of comm NSAI nodes. She remembered one of the options for her right arm was an auxiliary data connector. After flipping through several configuration options, she found it, and the ‘skin’ on her right pinky slid back, and a second hard-Link socket appeared.
She reached out to the closest comm NSAI and plugged into one of its ports.
Rika couldn’t help but laugh as a Nietzschean ship captain called down to his engineering room, and got a mech corporal instead.
Niki didn’t respond for a moment, then asked,
Niki laughed.
Rika finally found Chase aboard the Peerless. He was breaching the auxiliary helm control room, but he’d lost communication with Alison.
She linked them back up, routing their comms through a waste processing system aboard the dreadnought.
Rika pulled back from direct conversation with her teams and looked at the battlespace through the eyes of the station’s sensors and scan analysis NSAIs.
The Marauders now had full control of forty of the ships they’d breached, and the other twenty would be in their control, or disabled, within minutes.
She considered the remaining forty Nietzschean-controlled ships that had pulled away from the station. Niki was holding off firing on them because of their proximity to Marauder-controlled vessels, using the station’s rails to instead keep the ships further out on the move, restricting their firing solutions.
Rika wondered if she could use her abilities to breach the comms on the Nietzschean-controlled ships as well. Even if it was nothing more than a distraction, it could prove useful.
The Niets still hadn’t turned off their c
onnections to the station nets, so she connected to their networks with ease, finding the same flawed relays and switching their hashing algorithms.
Now she had access to all their attempted communications, and was able to block anything she didn’t want to get through.
Rika wasn’t sure how, but she could tell that the AI still seemed disoriented after having new parts of his mind opened up. Ironically, she knew that the same sort of thing was happening to her, but in her case, it wasn’t disorienting at all.
It was exhilarating.
Access codes and root tokens hit Rika’s mind, and she connected to the operations center’s systems with those credentials.
Rika found the operation center’s nodes and began to feed them new information directly, throwing the room into chaos. From the messages being sent, she realized that Admiral Fels was present in the room.
She appropriated his public tokens and masqueraded as him, issuing new orders to the ships, directing them into sub-optimal vectors. Some didn’t take the partially authenticated commands, but many did.
Referencing scan data that was flowing into her mind, Rika commanded the bulk of the Nietzschean ships to fire on the ‘Lance, saving the Republic from further abuse.
Red indicators began to appear on the edges of scan as the Nietzschean ships at other stations began to undock, moving toward the battlespace surrounding Ursa Station.
Rika attempted to connect to those ships, but without pre-existing internal access, she was unable to make a privileged connection.