by C. F. Harris
I tried to keep the frustration out of my voice, but it was difficult. Where the hell were they? It’d been a year since I lost the Nichelle Nichols in a fight with the Kliks. A year of searching. A year of nothing. It was like the Kliks had disappeared.
Only I knew they were out there. They hit us hard and fast and then disappeared, but that only meant there was something out there building up.
At least that’s what the eggheads at Fleet headquarters thought. I was inclined to agree with them.
“Charging up faster than light drive and making the jump to the next planet,” I said. The bucket of bolts was my only companion out here in this lone scout ship that was my punishment and, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, maybe also my salvation. “So far the Vega system seems clear.”
“Affirmative. Acknowledged and added to the record,” the Landau said.
I frowned. The ship didn’t care that I was frustrated. It was a bunch of automated systems.
I was disappointed. I’d hoped to find something this close to Earth, but no dice. Near earth seemed to be where they showed up, which is what made it so infuriating when we couldn’t ever find them in our own back yard.
The Kliks came out of nowhere, hit random merchant ships, and then disappeared into the void. Sure we took the occasional prisoner when one of their scout ships was discovered, but that was rare.
The real bitch was no one knew why they’d stopped their harassing attacks with the big capital ships. Did they stop because they were building up for something? Were they busy somewhere else?
No one could even figure out where their home world was to send scouts and try and figure that out.
They were nowhere within a good hundred light year radius of the Sol system, that was for sure, which made it all the more frustrating that they’d moved in and out of our territory hitting us with such little effort and such great success.
The faster than light drive spooled up and there was a brief flash, a brief passing wave of nausea, as I was pulled slightly out of normal space and reinserted in front of the next planet in the Vega sector.
I glanced at my readouts once the ship flashed back into normal space. Everything looked good on the FTL, but it’d be a short while before it was charged enough for the next jump.
Not that the recharge time was an issue. I planned on taking a leisurely look around anyway.
“Plenty of time to do that and catch up on the latest VRPG,” I muttered.
Usually military life was a game of a lot of traveling interspersed with brief moments of intense action and terror, but ever since I’d finagled this scout ship I didn’t even have the brief action and terror.
I should be glad I even had the Landau though. Usually losing a ship like Nichelle would be a career terminating event.
For all that traveling the stars alone in a modified scout ship might as well be an end to my career. I was sure there were plenty in the admiralty who thought it was a punishment.
I sighed and looked out the windows. Which was silly, but it was habit. My instruments would catch anything long before I saw anything with my Mark One eyeball, but I couldn’t help but look out at the planet. It was the habit of an old space explorer, even though I was only a decade out of the academy and still fairly young for a captain in the Fleet.
Even if I was a one-person captain exploring a backwater close to Earth driving a heavily modified and even more heavily armed scout ship.
Still, I had a job to do, so I scanned the skies. I looked down at the planet below. A gas giant that roiled with flashes of lightning. This planet had a couple of moons, though none of them could support life.
Whenever people got around to actually populating this system it would be nice and easy to strip mine them for resources. No blue humanoids to fight off.
I rolled my eyes and let out a disgusted sound. Movies from the days of ancient spaceflight could be so ridiculous. As though people would actually fight on the surface of a moon instead of just bombarding a place from orbit and picking up the valuable resources afterwards.
The Fleet’s motto had always been if you have to use a breathing apparatus to fight against a native force that didn’t have air tanks then removing the atmosphere made as much sense as fighting on the surface. Usually the natives didn’t have breathing masks of their own which made pacifying them that much easier once they realized where their atmosphere was going.
“Anything in this area?” I asked.
“Nothing on the sensors,” the computer said.
I rolled my eyes and let out another disgusted sound.
“That’s exactly what everyone in the Fleet hears right before the Kliks got the drop on them,” I muttered.
It turned out the computer’s definition of “nothing showing up on the sensors” included nothing showing up because it was hiding behind, say, the mass of a moon.
You had to be vewwy vewwy quiet, from an ELINT perspective, hunting Kliks.
“Let’s launch a probe here and leave it. Maybe it’ll tell us something before we leave the system,” I said.
The ship bucked under me as a probe launched. Immediately the comforting steady ping from its signal filled the cabin. I turned it down so it was just barely on the level of conscious thought.
The pinging wasn’t absolutely necessary, but I already had so many things to keep track of in the cockpit that all the various beeps and whistles were like a symphony to me. I could make out any discordant note in an instant, and it would alert me far faster than a blinking light.
Where the hell were they?
The Kliks were so odd. So erratic. They tended to hit human outpost in spots we barely thought were important. At least they were spots that were barely important in this day and age. The sort of outposts that would’ve been long forgotten by any species that had discovered faster than light travel. Outposts that were meant to plant the human flag in a system since it was cheaper to maintain those bases than it was to decommission them in a post-FTL world.
Faster than light travel.
Most detectors were designed to detect a ship coming out of warp space. Dropping out of warp space right on top of your enemy was was the best way to get the drop on them, after all. At least that’s what the tactical geniuses in the intel department said after every ship disappeared.
“Computer, how fast was the object that tripped the sensors traveling?”
“It appeared to be traveling at 0.5c and slowing.”
Interesting. That definitely wasn’t a chunk of ice falling into the star system if it was starting at half the speed of light and slowing down. That also got me to thinking about something I hadn’t really considered before.
What if they weren’t closing faster than light, and that was the problem in a world where everyone assumed an attack would come from a ship dropping out of FTL because that was the way it'd been done for centuries?
4
Dalia
The notion was crazy, especially considering how much trouble they’d caused for us with their raids. It violated every doctrine we’d come up with. It boggled the mind to think all that trouble could be caused by aliens sneaking up on us slower than c, but it was also something worth following up on.
Particularly if they were scouting a system so close to Earth. And if my hunch was correct then they were out there. I just had to find them before they found me.
And I had a pretty good idea of what would require an enemy to come at us at less than FTL while also allowing them to fade in and out like ghosts.
“Scan likely paths for a ship entering the system from one of the old jump points,” I said.
“One moment,” the computer said. “Searching through best possible approach based on jump point positioning as of the last survey three hundred years ago.”
I rolled my eyes. That could take the computer awhile considering it might have to find the points where a trick of a star’s gravity well meeting deep space allowed ships to instantaneously travel from poin
t to point along a web created among the stars. Clearly keeping up with those hadn't been a priority, and it might be coming to bite us in the ass now.
“I’m going to catch some rest in that case,” I said. “Wake me when you find something.”
“Acknowledged,” the computer said.
I pulled down the REM inducer and lights flashed in front of my eyes in a sequence that put me into a light sleep. I didn’t understand the science. I just used it.
I found myself floating over a battlefield and frowned. This again. I saw this an awful lot in my dreams lately, and the consistency made me wonder if something was going on.
The intel people said it wasn’t possible for ESP to reach out across the vast distances of space, but the realism of this dream was enough to make me wonder.
Giant crablike creatures moved across the cratered landscape. I had no idea what the fuck they were. Aliens of some sort, obviously. And there he was again.
I shivered looking at the alien. He was even worse off now than he’d been before. It was like my dreams were telling me the story of some poor son-of-a-bitch that the universe was making its bitch.
I watched as a blue glowing object landed next to the alien’s crater. It exploded and he went down. Neural disruptor. Damn. Everything faded to black and he floated in a black void staring at me.
He was a mess, but I could still see how fucking hot he was. It was a pity this was a dream, otherwise something might come of it. He looked like he was on the verge of despairing. Giving up.
He needed help. Something to keep him going, even if this was only a dream. I opened my mouth and shouted.
“What are you doing down there soldier? You aren’t down yet! Now get up and show these bastards what you’re made of!”
The noises coming out of my mouth made no sense to me, but I got the impression I was speaking his language. From the way he stood a little straighter the words seemed to work.
Then the void receded as an insistent beeping crowded into the void. The persistent beeping of the computer telling me it was time to wake up and get back to work.
I didn’t want to get back to work though. I wanted to hover in that void with that strange green-skinned hunk with the odd ridge on his nose. It’d been awhile what with all the time I’d been spending all by me onesies in the Landau this past year.
I was going to have to check the REM inducer. It was doing weird things to my dreams lately.
Whatever. I tapped an irritated finger against the console as I realized the computer wasn’t close to finishing its calculations.
“Why did you wake me if you aren’t done?” I asked.
“You were not woken up,” the computer responded. “You came out on your own.”
Great. Just what I needed. A smartass computer on top of everything else.
I’d been down long enough that the FTL was recharged. I tapped a button to spool up the faster than light drive. When the computer was finished with its calculations I wanted to be ready to go.
“Calculation complete,” the computer said after about another mind numbing hour.
“Finally!” I said. “What do you have?”
“At least five hundred probable approaches,” the computer said.
That didn’t help. There was no way I was going to be able to search all those routes in a timely manner. It was a long shot anyway, hoping to catch their ship on its way in. Assuming it was a ship.
“New parameter computer,” I said. “I want you to give me probable paths based on a ship trying to avoid the picket sensors.”
“With faster than light technology any of those paths would be as likely as the next,” the computer said.
They said these computers weren’t exactly thinking machines. They were impressive, but they didn’t have anything pesky like sapience or consciousness. Though the fact that the computer was defaulting to FTL approaches when I'd specifically asked for jump point approaches spoke volumes as to how ingrained FTL doctrine was in the Fleet. It was even hard coded into the damn computers.
There were computers out there that did think more freely, but it was pesky dealing with sapience in the thing running a ship’s systems so the Fleet had safeguards figuring convenience didn't trump a potential Galactica scenario. Only there were times I suspected the scout ship was getting just a little snippy, just a little sarcastic, with me.
I figured that was just my time in deep space and my mind grasping for some sort of emotional interaction, but still.
There was my hunch. We’d figured out how to operate FTL in gravity wells, but what if the Kliks never figured that trick out? What if the object the pickets detected was moving at half light speed and slowing because they still used jump drives mixed with conventional stuff?
“I want you to pretend we’re talking about a capital ship from before the days of faster than light travel within gravity wells,” I said, gritting my teeth. “A ship using jump points to enter the system is the parameter.”
Jump drives had been phased out entirely as far as I knew. It was possible to get in touch with those ships fairly rapidly even if they did have to make slow jumps from star to star. It was a hell of a lot faster than ships moving at relativistic speeds, aka slower than the speed of light.
There were countless hunks of metal that’d been flung between the stars before even jump points had been discovered, for all that it’d been a staple in sci-fi forever. One of the pesky strategic bitches about making war in the days before jump point faster than light travel was you had to send your fleets screaming across the endless void at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light with no way of actually getting in touch with them once they’d been sent out across that void due to relativity.
That led to some awkward situations once somebody actually decided to do some experiments with jump point travel outside of our gravity well. War fleets still showed up at the edge of star systems poised to go in and end any civilizations in that system only to discover a fleet envoy already there waiting for them to let them know the war was long over and they could all go home, and oh, by the way, they’d be going home immediately rather than turning around and spending another couple of years, relatively speaking, traveling between the stars while decades passed back on earth.
A beep from the computer brought me out of my reverie.
“New calculations complete,” the computer said. “Showing three likely locations for approach, assuming a pre-faster than light travel jump drive capital ship approaching through the pickets that went off but avoiding others within the system.”
I grinned. Now that was more like it! “Good. Take us to the location that's most likely based on a typical deceleration pattern.”
There was a small problem with going on a long search like this. I was starting to get sloppy, and I didn’t even realize it until the ship popped out of faster than light and I saw a giant capital ship looming in front of me.
I grinned. “That’s a bingo!”
Only that massive capital ship was turning towards me. I could see on my readout that various weapons were powering up. A beam shot out and hit my ship. Immediately everything went dark around me.
Emergency power came up, but it wasn’t nearly enough to launch anything from the vast array of energy weapons at my disposal.
If I’d told the computer to come out of FTL farther from the point of interest I might’ve been able to get the drop on them. If I’d been faster on the draw I might’ve gotten a shot off. Only I didn’t do any of that, and basically I was a sitting duck with them using whatever the hell that weapon was on me.
I thought about that soldier on some hopeless battlefield in my dreams. I was just about as screwed as he was now, even if I was in a nice comfortable scout ship instead of on some planet fighting a hopeless battle.
Fuck.
5
Kir
“We don’t have to do this,” I said.
“That’s what you think. She’s mine!” the man snarled.
> He leapt forward and slashed at me with the strange barbed weapon the Kliks had tossed in here with us. I looked up to the arena surrounding us. To the multi-legged creatures staring down at us with their eyestalks craning forward so they could get a better look at the carnage.
My stomach churned. It disgusted me to think this is what my life had come to. It also disgusted me to think that this is what my people had come to.
The man facing me wore the tatters of an officer of the penal battalion. He might’ve been one of my officers, but it was difficult to tell. There were a lot of former soldiers who’d been thrown into the grinder on that world.
“You’re acting like an animal,” I said. “If we simply…”
“No!” he shouted, coming at me again. “This is what they want! You haven’t been here long enough to…”
His words were cut off as I dodged his weapon easily. Clearly this was an officer who’d forgotten his hand to hand training.
I hadn't forgotten mine, and it’d come from a place that was a lot more unforgiving than some pampered hand-to-hand instructor at their vaunted academy.
My fist connected with his gut. He doubled over as his momentum carried him into my fist and all the wind was knocked out of him. The strange barbed mace he held in his hands with a blade on the other end also clattered to the floor.
I picked it up without hesitation. I didn’t want to kill this guy, but I also wasn’t going to leave him with the only weapon in this arena.
I looked to the woman on the other side of the arena. She cowered there and stared off into the distance. The ridge on her nose quivered in terror.
I hated to see anyone like that. I looked to the officer. To the man who was supposed to uphold the best of what our military had to offer.
If he was the best then that said something very bad for our people. I was rushing across the arena before I realized what I was doing, and kicked him again before he had a chance to get up.