by Andrew Beery
After the Taserite Ambassadors were onboard and settled in, we received one more transmission from the hive. Our request for advanced missile technology and shielding had been approved. We were to head to a star known as Beta Cancri. It was the home of the Taserite’s primary hive. It is there that we were to receive our upgrades. It is also where we discovered a few unexpected surprises.
Chapter 23: A Bone for the Dog
Beta Cancri was some three-hundred light years from Sol. Fortunately, it was only twenty-three light years from where we had first encountered the Tas. The trip through Skip Space took us a little over a week.
In that time, we learned quite a bit about our newest crew members. As the Taserites did not use names in the same way we did… and because they always traveled together; we took to calling them both Tas… collectively.
The homeworld we were approaching was not the Taserite birth world. That world had been devoured in a supernova many eons ago. What made their new home all the more interesting was that it was in no way suited, environmentally, for the Tas.
The world orbited a relatively young Red Giant that was only about 1.8 billion years old. Beta Cancri was about thirty-four times the size of Earth’s Sol but was only 1.7 times the mass. That meant that the nuclear furnace within the star did not burn nearly as hot as Earth’s sun.
As a result of the drastically expanded radius but only moderately greater mass, the planets orbiting Beta Cancri did so much closer to the sun’s surface. These worlds tended to be exposed to much greater levels of radiation.
The world the Taserite Hive occupied was called Faqqa, which according to Tas meant burst and split world. As we entered orbit, it was immediately clear why the planet had been given that name. The 4,000-kilometer-long Valles Marineris on Mars would be swallowed up many times over in any one of the three major canyons on Faqqa.
The world seemed to be one massive desert… surrounded by more desert… and where there wasn’t desert, there was endless expanses of sand. I think you get my point. The atmosphere had been largely eroded by the solar winds. It was about as inhospitable an Earth-sized rocky world could be.
The primary hive occupied a series of impressive pressurized domes that provided protection from the solar radiation as well as a breathable atmosphere… at least according to Taserite standards.
The level of technology required to maintain the domes and protect them from meteorite strikes was well beyond even the level of the Galactic Order. Tas informed us that it was Ancestor technology that kept Taserites safe.
As for why they remained on this God-forsaken world, it was because this was the greatest single concentration of Ancestor artifacts. The Tas were essentially curators and they chose to live near the treasures they protected.
Orbiting the planet were a series of elaborate shipyards and space stations. It was into one of these shipyards that the Tas had us park the Gilboa. As big as our ship was, it was dwarfed by the berth we pulled into. I couldn’t even imagine the ship that might have filled this bay.
Tas informed us that we would be welcome to debark and enjoy the station. The environmental systems had been designed specifically for the Ancestors… which meant we would be comfortable.
We were informed that the retrofit would take two days and that another week would be required to train the Gilboa personnel in the operation, repair and upkeep of the new systems.
Unfortunately, it would not be possible to give us the means required to manufacture the neutronium kinetic energy rounds ourselves. We would, however, be supplied with several hundred of the missiles as well as the Higgs field suppression systems required to reduce their mass to a level that could allow them to be easily handled.
Before the Tas could begin the work, the Gilboa needed to be evacuated. Installation work would require opening up large parts of the ship to the hard vacuum of space. In addition, per my instructions, there were aspects of the technology used to do the retrofitting that I did not want generally known… even to my own crew.
The J’ni had no problem accepting this order. It was in their nature to defer to the command decisions of others. This was not the case with the human engineers… especially Whiskers.
In the end, I made an appeal to history. In WWII three small countries, Germany, Italy and Japan, took on the rest of the world and almost won. They used technology, developed mostly by the Germans, as a force multiplier.
The Germans were the first to develop long-range missiles. They developed submarines capable of staying submerged for hundreds of miles. They developed a radio navigation system that allowed German night bombers to accurately engage targets without being able to see them. The Germans also developed the most capable jets, night vision systems and numerous other first-of-their-kind weapons systems.
It was only the size and determination of the Allied forces which ultimately outnumbered the Axis forces two to one, that allowed the good guys to have a chance.
Now imagine what would happen if a despot like Hitler were to suddenly have access to technology that wasn’t a few years ahead of the rest of the world… but many centuries. Even letting potential despots know that humanity could have access to such technologies would let a genie out of the bottle that would be impossible to put back in.
My friend didn’t like it, but he ultimately agreed with the logic.
Lori, Whiskers and I were on the last shuttle to leave the ship. In some ways I felt like a kid going to bed the night before Christmas. I couldn’t wait to get up the next morning and see what Santa brought… if Santa was a plethora of two-hundred-pound, poison gas breathing, intelligent slugs.
***
The space station we were dropped off at was… well words could not begin to do it justice.
I’ve seen more than just about any other human in recorded history. All that said… I was impressed. The technology was so advanced, it almost disappeared. Corridors where lit, with no visible light sources. When we wanted access to a room, a door was there. When we didn’t, the door was gone. If I felt cold, the air was suddenly warmer. If I was hungry, there was a food dispenser immediately ahead.
At some point I realized I was tired. A door appeared with a sign above it… Admiral’s Suite.
Lori and I spent the next few hours enjoying the sights… without ever leaving the quarters we had been assigned. The suite had six rooms including fully functional kitchen with a replicator the Tas had programmed to duplicate the foods found on the Gilboa. The other rooms included an office, a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom bigger than some bedrooms I had slept in… and… a heated swimming pool.
It was obvious that the Ancestors knew how to live! The pool was especially inviting. Lori and I loved to swim but it had been years since we had had the opportunity. Sadly, as we didn’t have any swim suits, I expected the pool to go unused. Lori quickly put an end to that thought by shedding her shipsuit and beckoning me to do the same.
Did I mention that my wife had lovely curves in all the right places? I had wanted to explore the rest of the station but there is only so much temptation a man can resist. We frolicked in the water for several hours… and even got some swimming in… amongst other things… did I mention the curves?
After a while we both got hungry… with all the physical activity. Exiting the pool, we spotted folded towels near our folded and cleaned cloths. Thinking that somebody had come in while we were engaged in those things that married couples engage in… Lori turned every shade of red possible. I let her blush for a few minutes before I laughed and told her I had seen a wall panel slide open and service bots come in and do the deed as it were.
She hit me playfully in the shoulder and promised to make me pay for my crimes later… I looked forward to that. They don’t call me a dirty old dog for nothing. It had been far too long since we had just enjoyed each other’s company and passionate embrace.
Finally, after a few hours’ sleep, a nice meal of scrambled eggs and the best synthetic bacon I had ever enjoye
d; we decided it was time to meet up with some of the others.
We began to explore the wonders of the rest of the station. Despite the seriousness of our situation, we were having a great time. I hated to admit it, but we needed the down time. I could have hoped that it would last forever. Sadly, that hope faded all too soon.
***
“Will ya look at that,” Whiskers said for about the umpteenth time.
The Ancestor station was truly a wonder to behold. My chief engineer had just used a teleportation pad for the first time. It seemed the Ancestors didn’t believe in elevators to get from point A to point B. Instead you stepped on a circular oval on the floor.
There were triangular marks on the disks and if you exited the oval over one of these directional arrows you were teleported to another area of the station. The disk you landed on would typically have its own set of directional arrows… including one back to where you came from.
I had made myself dizzy when I discovered you could hop back and forth rapidly on the same set of pads. It seems that human optical nerves (nor my wife for that matter) were not inclined to allow such behaviors without incurring consequences. Translation: I made myself sick and threw up before I realized what had happened. As a side note, the bacon was better the first time through.
Had I not been feeling woozy, I might have been fascinated by how efficiently my vomitus was absorbed by the station’s floor.
I was about to suggest Whiskers try the same fast hop trick that I had so much enjoyed when the hall lights turned red and began to thrum. A set of three transportation pads appeared in front of us. Each was circled by undulating red rings. I looked at the others… and stepped onto the nearest pad.
The three of us appeared in what seemed to be a massive control room. A number of MEUs moved about the room. One device moved in our general direction.
“Greetings Admiral Riker. I’m afraid your services will be required a little sooner than anticipated. The Defilers have found us.”
***
It seems sometimes you go looking for a fight and other times the fight comes looking for you. This was one of those times.
The Tas had given me a quick, and I do mean quick, overview of the control room and its capabilities. It seemed the Tas were not as well suited to be warriors as they were to be curators.
The automated defense systems could only do so much. Had this invasion happened in a week in either the future or the past, there would have been no issue. A massive cloaking field would have been erected and the wealth of technology on this world and in orbit around it would have gone undetected. Even if the Defilers had attempted to penetrate the cloak, they would have been thwarted by a powerful deflector shield that they would have found impossible to defeat.
That said, the Defilers had arrived at a delicate time when critical components of the Gilboa’s retrofit were in transit. There was no way to hide the mass of shuttles and supply vessels traveling to and from the planet’s surface.
To make matters worse, the Defilers, as we were now calling them, had exited Skip Space where they should not have been able to… half a light minute from Faqqa… impossibly deep within the Beta Cancri gravity well.
For a day that had started off nice enough, it sure had taken a turn for the not so nice. While we were still trying to take the measure of the situation, we saw dozens of small attack craft exiting the twenty or so large vessels that just dropped in. This day just kept getting better and better.
Chapter 24: Attack Dog…
“How far can we extend the shields? Can we cover those inbound shuttles?”
“Negative Admiral. They are too spread out,” one of the Tas replied. Given the synthetic nature of their voices, it was impossible to tell which one of them was actually speaking. In point of fact, it probably didn’t matter. It seemed the Tas, in close proximity to each other, enjoyed a true hive mind… undoubtedly telepathic in nature.
“Can you give me a three-dimensional map of what’s going on?” I asked. It was a simple request, but it seemed there were some concepts humans and the Tas were not ever going to be able to communicate to each other. The concept of visualizing something in three-dimensions was one of them.
To their credit, the Tas where very apologetic, but they simply did not understand the nature of the request.
We needed to move on. Time was getting to be critical.
“OK, let’s do this. Any ships that are close enough to the shipyard to get under the protection of our shields within the next ten minutes are to proceed. All other craft are to head for the planet’s surface, preferably to a surface installation with shielding, but any landing site will do. The key is to get on the ground.”
“Orders acknowledged, Admiral,” a Tas answered.
“Whiskers, find Colonel Morrison. I need his men in their Mark Ones as soon as possible… preferably yesterday.”
“Roger that!”
I looked at Lori.
“See if you can get Mitty and the Ambassadors up here… wherever here is. One of the Tas should be able to help you.”
It turned our she didn’t need to summon the Archon Hologram. As I turned back around, I about had a heart attack. Mitty had materialized and was floating down to the floor from about six-feet up in the air.
“My pardon, Admiral. The Tas allowed me to transfer my holographic matrix to the station’s battle bridge, but unfortunately I had no schematics from which to gage my location.”
“No worries my friend. I need you and the Gilboa’s AI to help me understand the dynamics of what’s happening. Work with the Tas to see if you can’t get me a three-dimensional display. You may have to simply work with their data feeds and route them through the Gilboa.”
In less than a minute, Mitty had the display I was looking for. While I had been waiting, I reached out to the Colonel. The Tas had been able to teleport his men’s MES and related equipment to the station. They would be suited up and ready to go in fifteen minutes. I told him to make it ten.
I rotated the newly generated holographic display. I could see from the speed of the approaching attack craft that some of the shuttles heading back to the surface where going to be hard-pressed to make a landing in or near the protected zones that had access to Ancestor-grade shields. A few were going to need to make hot landings a good one to two-hundred kilometers away. The fighters were already launching what appeared to be Electro-Magnetic Pulse weapons in a bid to disable some of the shuttles.
It seemed a few of the shuttles, perhaps four, were already compromised. I ordered those ships to bunch up as best they could. I was going to send Mike and his men down to them as fast as I could but there would be a lot of ground to cover if they spread out too far.
“Mitty, do we have anything like point defense weapons we can use to harass those incoming attack craft… give them something to think about besides their prey?”
“Affirmative, Admiral. The station has a comprehensive system for deflecting asteroids.”
“Excellent,” I said. “It’s about time we have some luck. Start giving those attack craft a hard time. Also see if you can target some of those bigger ships with some of those neutronium kinetics energy weapons we have lying about. A good KEW hitting them ‘where the sun doesn’t shine’ should get them rethinking their attack.”
I watched as the battle unfolded on two fronts. The asteroid PDS took out about a third of the Defiler’s attack ships before they got smart and ducked to the far side of the planet. The bad news was we couldn’t hit them anymore. The good news was it gave the pilots of the damaged shuttles a lot more time to get their ships down.
Our neutronium kinetics did a number on the enemy’s larger ships. Three of them never saw what hit them. The others jumped into Skip Space before our kinetics got to them. Their ability to enter and exit Skip Space so close to a gravity well was going to be a real headache… but it was a problem for another day.
My suspicion was that the Defilers were after the Ancestor technolog
y that had been destined for the Gilboa. The last thing in the world I wanted was for us to hand them yet another advantage. So, I was determined to keep the enemy away from those grounded shuttles that were out in the open.
I discussed options with Mitty and the Tas. After a few minutes I had a plan. Now it was just a matter of seeing if we would have enough time to put it into place.
***
As I said earlier, all but four of the shuttles had made it to the protection of the ground-based shelters. Those four shuttles had taken damage from the Electro-magnetic pulse weapons that the Defilers had fired. The EMPs didn’t do serious damage but they did prevent those four shuttles from making it back to the safety of their shielded base.
Sadly, Mitty informed me that these same four shuttles were carrying a handful of the neutronium kinetics and perhaps more importantly, the Higgs field inhibitors needed to use them. These devices effectively allowed mass to be negated. The applications went far beyond advanced kinetics. They could be used to make a small fighter unbelievably maneuverable as well as allowing it to mount massive ablative shields.
At the end of the day… we just didn’t want the bad guys to have all the neat toys. They already were playing the game with a seriously impressive and enhanced Skip Drive… I’d be damned if I was going to let them have any more of the good stuff before we had a chance to even the odds.
My biggest worry, at the moment, was those four shuttles out in the middle of nowhere.
It seemed God still had a soft spot in His heart for a sinner like me. I had hoped that the Tas would have some way to teleport my Marines to the surface near those shuttles. I was not disappointed. Each of the shuttles had at least one working teleport pad. That meant Mike’s Marines could pop down four at a time – one to each shuttle. They’d, then, have to clear the pad for the next Marine.
It would get the job done but, sadly, it would take time… a full twenty minutes to get an entire company down. That was about ten minutes more that we would need before the Defilers’ attack craft rounded the curve of the planet.