Soundless Conflicts

by S. Walker

  Click. "-or so help me every payroll contract from here to-" Click. Check the recycler levels: Fifteen minutes, give or take.

  He got back to thinking.

  But now the rescue ship was running into trouble. With some kind of boarding drones, it sounded like. Mark slowly spun in place, face thoughtful as he considered the implications. He'd never heard of boarding drones before. That was interesting, in an academic kind of way. But also terrible, in a 'want to get rescued' sense. Also he'd never heard of a drone powered by gravity before: That was a wild leap in technology, the kind of thing he'd have pursued a certification for immediately. Amazing, really. He wanted to see how it worked.

  But from a safe distance.

  Which circled him back to the original problem: Who was the incoming ship here for? Executive Targer? The facility Management? Was it even a rescue? Too many questions and he didn't have enough information to make good guesses. Which only left one way to resolve the problem.

  A conversation. He hated those.

  Mark took a solid three minutes practicing what to say, then another minute nerving himself up to opening a connection. He was fairly sure the ship could hear them-- standard Comm setups were absurdly more powerful at sending and receiving signals than emergency skinsuit transmitters. What he didn't know was how to start talking. What did someone say when trapped in a life-and-death situation aboard a destroyed habitation ring?

  He coughed nervously, then tapped his wrist console and stared into space while talking to thin air.

  "Hello, rescue ship. This is Independent Contractor Mark Thompson." Good start. A greeting, then identification. That was how conversations started.

  Then he blew it: "How are you?"

  Chapter 22

  Next Level Planning

  Bandaged, exhausted and loaded with painkillers is a bad way to arrive on the bridge. Jamet was beyond caring.

  Paul helped her to the co-CEO workstation, getting her settled before retaking his own seat at Environmental. Landing in the chair felt like it had the weary finality of an orbital shuttle docking. "What did I miss?"

  Emilia, Siers and Janson broke off an animated discussion involving the forward shared workspace and lot of pointing. All of them tried talking at once, a storm of sound that made her wince and raise a hand. "One at a time? Please?"

  The captain raised a hand. "I'll take this. Back me up if you need to, Comms-- you've talked the most with our friend." He turned to look at Jamet, then did a doubletake. "Lieutenant? Should you be up?"

  From the shoulders down she was a mummy of long, self-adhesive tension wraps that went all the way below the uniform top. Shredded skinsuit hung limply around her waist, empty sleeve arms flopping to either side of the chair like white tubing. Everywhere not covered by bandages sported the ugly yellow and purple of deep bruising. Seeing an image of her own heavily striped back at Medical was an experience that wouldn't go away soon-- she'd counted at least a dozen crisscrossing welts before resolutely looking away. Paul gave her a prescription for strong painkillers, then offered a sedative as well with a sympathetic look. "You probably will not want to be moving around much for a few days."

  In a moment of pride she'd taken the painkillers, but refused the sedatives. That was looking like a mistake, now.

  "I've been a lot better, sir. But I'm going to be here if I can help." She glared at Paul until he stopped looking like he was about to comment.

  Siers gave her a thoughtful look, then nodded once. "I admire that more than you know. First of all, you'll be glad to know our attackers were drawn off by the lifeboat ejection. As soon as the GravComm fired off all of them oriented on it and impacted ten minutes later." On screen a long, looping red line indicated the attacker courses. "After smashing the lifeboat they took a long path back to the belt they started from. We marked their positions." Red dots appeared briefly, then ghosted away.

  He rubbed both eyes, then sat back in the chair. "Moving on: It seems Comms has made contact with someone on the habitation ring who goes by the name of Mark Thompson. Independent Thompson, in fact."

  Jamet blinked. "That's... rare. An Independent is worth quite- I mean, contractors are incredibly useful. What did he have to say?" If anything she was understating the case: In the entire time at Corporate she'd only met three of the incredibly overskilled (and pay-adjusted) workers. Having one contracted to a team made a hell of an impression during budget meeting negotiations, it was almost a guarantee for getting the credit your section needed. To have one of them, here? No wonder there were survivors. "So the station is intact, or at least some of it? How many do we need to rescue? A thousand? Two, ten?"

  Siers crushed her optimism. "Thirty nine." He said it with the clipped tone of an elegy for the dead.

  From millions to barely three dozen. Jamet felt sick. "What happened?"

  "That's what we're discussing, actually. Emilia and I managed to get some answers from our friend, but he was running on oxygen depletion and had... other... concerns on his mind. In fact some details were like pulling teeth." He pointed to Comms. "Emilia, start us off?"

  "Right." The short woman turned her visor to the front workspace, pulling up an image of the Pilster system. "This is the best I can do from listening to descriptions, Thompson didn't know or wasn't sharing a lot. Now, here's the local infrastructure about seven months ago: Two working singularity processing stations, some heavy asteroid mining facilities and a dedicated smelter." She put icons up on the screen as each feature came up.

  "Wait, there's a smelter?" Jamet frowned. That was expensive, but it made sense for a startup in a double asteroid belt system. "Why haven't we seen it before now?"

  Emilia tapped her nose with one finger. "I asked the same thing, Princess. Right on the nose." A portion of the system map broke off into another callout, centered on the nearest asteroid belt. She zoomed it in, then highlighted a particularly dense series of slowly moving rocks. "It's right there. See the large black box looking thing? That's the smelter."

  She squinted. "The power is off? Or did they get attacked?"

  The small woman shrugged, visor flashing rainbow colors. "It looks like they just shut down their reactor and abandoned in place. If I had to guess they took the ore haulers and tried to run for it."

  Jamet worked her own console, pulling a database query onto the working half of the display. It lit up with a schematic and notes about smelting facilities. The standard layout looked like a pair of squares jammed on either end of a large tube, with docking bays for haulers on either side. "Oh, it's smaller than I thought. Less than a half mile long and a quarter wide. Fourteen people?" That seemed low. "Is it automated?"

  "Yes, ma'am." Janson tossed an icon onto her workspace. "Ah have worked them before. Basically just a big reactor, powers a plasma plume th' length of the tube. Ore goes in one side, gets crushed by a small singularity, then drifts to th' other end as the metals run right out of the rock. Fast operation, lot of machinery."

  "Wait, they use a singularity? Then why didn't they get attacked?"

  He shrugged, big shoulders going up and down. "Between ore shipments, maybe. Didn't have their small Krepsfield going an' just ended up shutting down before getting attention."

  "That's my bet!" Emilia closed the callout, returning to a display of the entire system. "Anyways, here's what we pieced together. About seven months ago our Independent thinks a food hauler came in from Kstrop-2; he was weirdly informative about pretty much every kind of foodstuff that comes with those shipments." An icon appeared at the system entrance point and began moving on a long arc for the nearest habitation ring, inching along at an impressive speed for a hauler with only one singularity. She tapped it once to zoom in. "They didn't make it very far before this happened."

  On screen a large contact appeared, an oval roughly in the shape of their attacker. Jamet winced. "It followed the hauler here, from Kstrop-2?"

  "Not just them, Princess." Emilia nodded to the screen as a second contact appeared,
hot on the trail of the first.

  Jamet jerked in surprise, then winced as something moved under her bandages. That was going to be painful later. "Two attackers?"

  Siers nodded, taking over control of the display. "It seems so. From here our Independent's account gets a little muddled. We know one of them went on a frenzy at the arrival point," on screen a large contact split off and began ramming system traffic near the arrival point one after the other. After every hit it would loop back around in a huge arc before accelerating at the next. It looked like a child's drawing of a deadly flower. "While the other continued chasing the hauler, catching it halfway to the habitation ring."

  A large icon slammed into the smaller hauler dot, obliterating it. "Those poor people."

  Emilia glanced at her, eyebrows raised. "Really? Nothing about the cargo? Surprised at you."

  Jamet put a finger in the air, then slowly levelled it at the Comm technician. "I think I've earned a little goodwill, if it's not too much to ask."

  Janson and Paul both looked at Emilia, who opened her mouth to retort. Then paused and slowly closed it again. "Alright. Sorry about that," she nodded at Siers. "Go ahead, captain."

  "Hmm." Siers looked between the two of them, then let the matter drop. The screen restarted again, icons back in motion. "After attacking the hauler, Thompson thinks this one kept going for their habitation station and impacted their gas processing facility." Dots met each other, leaving behind an empty ring like a perfect bullseye. "It clipped the gas giant-- we can see the plume still drifting if you care to look-- then turned and did the same to the other processing plant."

  Jamet's eyes widened as the red dot representing their attacker arced through a piece of the planet's atmosphere, then turned and accelerated unbelievably fast for the other. The strike wasn't as clean this time: Something about the angle or the orbital positioning threw the incoming hit off. It clipped a corner of the ring, cleanly slicing the top off, then took out the central extraction building. "That's why they lost orbit, isn't it?"

  Siers nodded. "Likely. But look at the second attacking ship." He indicated it on screen, still looping in long lines that intercepted ships as they scrambled to reach the system arrival point. "There's where the debris cloud came from that we ran into. Or at least the start of the cloud, because here's where our information ends."

  On screen a few ships managed to reach the arrival point, then turned and blasted outwards as fast as their drives could take them. Jamet would have cheered to see them escape... if the attacker hadn't orientated and followed, accelerating into a blur along a chase vector. "Oh no. There's another one somewhere in Corporate space? Which way did they go?"

  He handed the question off. "Emilia?"

  She nodded and threw an overlay up with system listings highlighted. "I checked the drift charts, there's two systems on an angle going out that way: Palos-1 and Jersteretting. Colony system and a Corporate HQ respectively, with a coin toss on which one has a brand new visitor." She seemed sad, subdued. "I wouldn't wish these things on anyone, but I really hope it went for the HQ and not several billion people."

  "For what's it worth, I agree with you." Jamet sighed. "That's not even an option. But what then? The other one just... hung around Pilster? Doing what?"

  Janson took over, his deep voice floating over the frozen display. "Think so, ma'am. I'd guess it made a home there, maybe a factory of some kind. Although after seeing our problem in Storage ah'm starting to think it just grows itself some company. But ah don't know-- the Independent didn't have anything for us after seeing one of 'em chase an outbound hauler."

  "Why not?"

  "And here's where I take over again," Siers declared. He wiped the shared display completely, then turned to look at Jamet. "We have a situation going on and I'm not sure how to handle it delicately. Your expertise is probably going to be needed quite a bit."

  She blinked. "I need to manually navigate something? I'm willing to try, but-"

  Emilia started laughing in a tired manner, followed a second later by a weakly grinning Paul. Janson just flashed her a bushy smile and a quick two finger wave-off. Even Siers chuffed. "Not quite, lieutenant. This is actually something from your other skillset, and a large part of what caught my eye when I picked up your contract: We need a Corporate Executive."

  "Aren't you an Executive?" Jamet thought about that for a moment, then did a slow facepalm. "Oh no. This whole time, I just assumed..."

  "Shareholder." Siers confirmed, then nodded around the room. "Shareholders, all. Although the practical difference is a bit of an intellectual argument, really. But regardless it's a fact none of us have ever worked within the Management hierarchy. Paul here," he nodded to the tall man. "Worked for an Executive. Our big Engineer was listed as collateral damage on a mining contract and Emilia-"

  "She already knows, Captain."

  "-prefers not to dwell on the past. But you, lieutenant, are the only Executive on board."

  Suddenly a whole lot of crew interactions made more sense. She'd known, of course-- they'd each told her in one way or another, sometimes flat out. But there was a big difference between knowing every member of the crew had a bad experience with Corporate and realizing she embodied everything about it they hated.

  She looked down, looked up. Looked anywhere but at four sets of eyes aimed her way. "You hate me." Don't cry. Co-CEOs didn't ever do that.

  "No-" Emilia struggled with the words. "Not really. I mean it was easy to at first, but you're just not..." she waved both arms. "You're just not, okay? That bad, I mean."

  Jamet ghosted a smile at the ceiling, then raised her tone to mimic the Comm technician's. "Well fuck me, you're all heart."

  Tension broke, the laughter coming for real this time. The group passed some unspoken hurdle then, a vital social line where Jamet went from being the joke to being included in the humor. Janson wiped both eyes and gave her a thumbs up, Siers smiled thinly and even Paul just shook his head in fake embarrassment.

  Emilia laughed the most, then pointed both fingers at Jamet. "Alright, I won't hold that against you... Lieutenant Impossible."

  Paul tipped an imaginary hat. "Impossible."

  Janson and Siers did the same, both of them grinning. "Impossible."

  She faked a growl, fighting a smile the whole time. "I do not have a verbal tic!" But it felt good. "Alright, maybe I do! Fine! Can we get back on topic, please?" Very good.

  They wound down by degrees, sobering up until Captain Siers redirected everyone. "As I was saying: Our Independent friend gave us some details on what's been happening to the population since the first attack happened. If I had to describe it in a single word, I would probably use 'horrific'. Perhaps worse."

  "That... doesn't sound good." But she had a bad feeling it did sound Corporate.

  "Not at all. To start with the entire Management-- Middle and Uppers-- were all on the central facility when it was obliterated by our attacker. Only two weren't present at the time: A Rachel Targer and her husband Thomas Minyer. They were checked into an oncology clinic with their son, Peter Minyer, for remission counseling. Lucky break for them, especially since the debris from the high-speed hit didn't immediately savage their section of the ring."

  That hit in all sorts of ways, most of them hard to process. But a more immediate thought jumped to mind. "So there's only two Executives left? That's not good. Most startups like this have lockouts on most of the emergency systems to prevent sabotage or theft. If the communications went down all at once and one of them wasn't physically nearby to authorize usage... oh no."

  Siers nodded sadly, his eyes locked in a thousand yard stare. "We're told the loss of life was... enormous. But even worse, it seems Executive Targer is now the only Management left in the group. You can image the stranglehold that is going on."

  Jamet could imagine it and, dead stars forbid, understood it. Closed in with an entire group of people who had every reason to kill her, with only one real power left to prevent it? There w
ere only two options out of that situation and nothing she'd ever witnessed in Corporate made it likely one of them was peaceful cooperation. "It's a dictatorship, isn't it? She's holding access hostage, probably getting rid of anyone who could threaten her." Then the other shoe dropped. "Dammit, if she knows rescue is coming everyone else is a potential witness against her for sanctions. She'll write everyone off."