by M. D. Cooper
She busied herself with reviewing the sensor node’s initialization process, noting that several subsystems remained offline, but that the main radio antennas were active, as was the wide-band dish. Two of the optical scopes were also online, feeding images down to the console in the room, though only one’s tracking servos were responding.
Jessica nodded, looking at the stellar cartography map that was beginning to form on the holo in front of her, deepening the mystery of what could have pulled them out of the jump.
A new voice entered her mind, and Jessica breathed a sigh of relief as she identified Chief Glenn.
The man sent a snort.
Jessica laughed.
A series of affirmative responses came before Trevor reached out privately.
Trevor only sent back a snort.
She reached the first bay almost ten minutes later. It was only a hundred meters away from the sensor node, but the number of sealed doors she had to manually open slowed her progress considerably.
Spoiled by doors. Who would have thought it?
The center of the bay was occupied by a mid-sized pinnace. She didn’t even need to board the ship to know it wasn’t going anywhere. Half its hull was scorched and covered in still-dripping fire-suppression foam from the bay’s systems.
However, the rack on the aft side of the docking bay held a dozen ARC-6A fighters, and by some miracle, they all appeared unscathed by whatever had damaged the pinnace.
Jessica walked to the dockmaster’s cabin that was set along the interior wall, and breathed a sigh of relief to see that the racking systems were active. She triggered the system to slide out one of the fighters, and then ambled toward the egg-shaped ship as it was set onto the hull.
Jessica was surprised to hear that.
Jessica sighed, knowing admitting that it made sense. A-grav could get knocked out, and if the pilot was encased in a shoot suit and safely tucked inside an ARC’s gel pocket, they could put up more of a fight than an enemy would expect.
She saw the suiting chamber to the left of the rack and hurried toward it, knowing that the process would take a few minutes.
“Oh, crap, it’s offline,” she muttered when the access panel wouldn’t respond.
Casting about for options, she saw a panel next to the chamber labeled ‘Emergency SCLSS’. Pulling it open, she saw a sealed packet and a helmet. She set the helmet on the deck, then quickly pulled off her EV suit, followed by the uniform underneath.
Ignoring the chill in the air, she tore open the SCLSS packet, and a rubbery mass fell into her hands. She quickly unfurled the shoot suit, struggling to grasp the slippery white second skin that appeared to be far too small. For a moment, Jessica considered forgoing the suit, but she knew that the fighter’s piloting systems would expect the suit’s hookups, and reprogramming its inputs would take longer than getting dressed. Finally locating the fastener, she pulled it down and slipped inside the suit’s compressive confines.
Once all the ports were seated, she pulled on the helmet and did her best to ignore the suit as it tested bio-feedback systems while she walked to the fighter.
unracked.
Jessica said as she sent a command to the fighter to let her in.
Above her, part of the hull irised open, and she saw the familiar gel pod within. An a-grav column drew her up, and within seconds, she was nestled within the fighter’s gel-filled cocoon. Connections snaked through the viscous liquid, connecting her to the ship, and then a prompt appeared on her HUD for sensory changeover.
She didn’t immediately accept the request, first running the fighter through a full diagnostic routine. It came back with only two secondary subsystems showing damage, and she decided that was likely as good as she could expect from any of the ships.
With a thought, she accepted the prompt to change over her senses, and an instant later, her ‘skin’ was no longer at the edge of her body, but rather at that of the ARC-6A’s hull. Her legs were the ship’s engines, her arms the weapons and maneuvering thrusters, and her eyes were its sensor arrays.
Jessica replied, triggering the fighter’s a-grav thrusters and lifting off the deck.
She skirted around the damaged pinnace on her way to the dark rectangle that lay beyond the bay doors.
Stars, I’ve missed this, she thought, savoring the feeling of the ship as her body, remembering the countless hours spent in the ARC-5s back in the Kap.
That memory sparked thoughts of the battle she’d fought against the Sirian scout ships, followed by the days waiting for rescue out in the deep black beyond the system’s heliopause.
Not this time, she told herself, though she wasn’t sure if her sentiment was that she wouldn’t be lost, or that if things went badly, there was no hope for rescue.
Once outside the ship, Jessica activated the ARC’s stealth systems and pushed the ship forward on a column of gravitons, angling slightly away from the approaching vessel in an attempt to get a view of its profile.
The approaching craft was still several light seconds away, and its delta-v had decreased, along with the amount of thrust coming off its engines. Once Jessica’s ARC was a dozen kilometers from the Lantzer, she was finally able to get an unobstructed view of the approaching vessel.
Well that’s a weird one, she thought, as the fighter’s sensors built up a picture of the approaching cruiser.
It was just over a kilometer long, though it was also wider than she’d initially thought. There was a curved dorsal arch, not dissimilar from the Lantzer’s, that terminated in a spherical section at the ship’s bow. Hanging from the arc were dozens of hundred-meter shafts. Her impression was that the ship resembled a fish’s skeleton.
That initial observation triggered the next: the ship appeared to have very little in the way of crew areas. Other than a few corridors running from the sphere at the bow to the engines, she suspected that there were almost no internal passageways within the bulk of the craft.
The sphere was a hundred meters across, which meant a crew of less than few dozen at most, and Jessica felt a measure of relief to know that they weren’t about to face off with a company of soldiers boarding the Lantzer.
Of course, I could just blow it out of the stars before it gets to us.
Jessica examined the enemy ship, selecting primary targets and programming her weapons to strike them with a single thought. The next problem she faced was that her single ship couldn’t shoot its way through the cruiser’s shields. However, if she built up enough delta-v, she could punch through them with her ARC and then fire on the targets during her flyby.
But first, I want to know what I’m up against.
Once her offensive options with the approaching fishbone ship were established, she pulled up the visuals of the Lantzer, passive scan sweeping over her own cruiser, looking for signs of external damage.
At a glance, it appeared that there were none, but closer examination showed scoring on several sensor arrays and sections of hull. None of it was structural in nature, but instead pointed to the ship being caught up in a massive electromagnetic surge—which was not surprising at this point, just not terribly informative, either.
Over the next thirty minutes, Jessica continued to drift toward the still-decelerating enemy ship while maintaining a tightbeam comm line back to the Lantzer.
While she’d been drifting through the black, Trevor and Karma had repaired the forward reactor, and Chief Glenn had brought the aft reactor online. Both powerplants were running at minimal output while the teams worked to disconnect damaged systems from the power grid before energizing more areas of the ship.
The chief’s fears about the CriEn modules had turned out to be correct. They’d completely shut down and would need to be carefully reactivated. For now, Jessica had directed the crew to continue their focus on shields and helm. They wouldn’t need CriEn levels of energy to power stasis shields against just one enemy cruiser—she hoped.
Jessica pulled up the memory of one of the ancient Scattered Worlds ships and sent the image to her husband.
Jessica laughed.
Despite her words, the ominous ship had Jessica on edge. It hadn’t made any attempt to communicate with the Lantzer, and its deceleration vector was such that it would come to zero delta-v only fifteen kilometers distant from the ISF cruiser.
In interstellar space, that was all but a collision.
As Jessica’s stealthed ARC-6A drew closer to the fishbone ship, more details began to appear. It was clearly utilitarian; little attention to an overall aesthetic had been given. Or, if it had, appreciation for the design was beyond her. A notion came to her mind that the vessel might be one of the most ‘un-human’ things she’d ever seen.
Maybe I’ve encountered a race of alien fish people.
She knew that was ridiculous—or close to it. Though humanity had explored close to ten percent of the galaxy, it was commonly believed that no other sentient life currently existed in the Milky Way.
There were some who argued that, given the vast distances, it was possible that intelligent—possibly even starfaring—species were active in other parts of the galaxy, but unless an observer was within a few hundred light years of their systems, visible signs of their activity would still be too far off.
Those were the rational speculators.
Other people believed that alien species were already active within the human sphere of expansion. Those fringe thinkers believed that it wouldn’t be that hard for an alien s
pecies to mimic humans well enough to pass amongst them. They maintained that there were even all-alien systems that no one had found yet, or, if human visitors had come to them, it would appear as though the aliens were just modded humans.
In all honesty, there were nearly as many theories as there were people to concoct them, and Jessica had never paid them much heed. None of the crazy ideas were much different than what had been floating around before she’d left the Sol System thousands of years ago.
But something about the ship made her think that if there were aliens out there, this might be the sort of vessel they’d construct.
She wasn’t sure what gave her that idea. It might be the angles, or the fact that it didn’t seem to be made with a human crew in mind, or just the fact that it appeared to be ever so slightly asymmetrical.
Thing gives me the heebies.
She looked over the ship for weapons, noting a few railguns mounted on the vessel’s spine, and what appeared to be defensive beam turrets around its engines. The forward sphere didn’t have any visible weapons, but that didn’t mean they weren’t hidden below hull plating.
It’s a warship, for sure, she thought, noting the total lack of portholes anywhere on the fishbone craft. But what is it doing? If it wanted to cripple us, it should have fired already. If it wanted to board, it would make sense to hold further out and send in its drones…or whatever it has.
As she continued to consider rational—and irrational—explanations for the ship’s behavior, the enemy vessel’s spherical bow passed in front of her ARC-6A. Other than its slow and steady braking, there still wasn’t any other sign of activity coming from the enemy vessel.
She was considering slowing her passage with a brief grav drive burn, when an EM burst flared from a point on the fishbone’s bow.
Alerts lit up across Jessica’s vision as her ARC’s movement was suddenly arrested, and then then her ship began to move toward the cruiser.
Shit! Graviton beam!
She fired the ARC’s engines and turned to boost away from the enemy ship, no longer concerned with stealth. Despite what should have been enough burn to pull away, the draw from the enemy ship was outmatching her own thrust.