by Mark Wandrey
Jim gave some thought to finding a place to fight, then realized the idea was insane. Whatever it was, the thing acted like it had…shields? It wasn’t possible. Neither was a high-energy weapon that damned small! It took serious megawatts to power a particle cannon, and more to run shields. He remembered learning about shield generators and how much space they took. Not to mention how they didn’t act properly when constantly in contact with metal, like the hull of the station. It was why boarding craft worked; they got inside the shields.
The biggest problem he had was a simple lack of firepower. He hadn’t expected to fight something like this. He had the arm-mounted chemical laser—total yield just under a megawatt—and a minigun on the other arm, devastating against small, lightly-armored infantry, but a joke against this. Maybe if he’d brought a magnetic accelerator cannon…but he doubted it. No, his only option was headlong flight. But then what? He glanced at his flickering controls, and one display caught his eye. Yes! He knew what to do.
Jim drove the suit via his pinplants in a careening, rebounding, and barely-controlled flight down the corridors. After several more high-energy shots tore through walls around him, he was convinced his frenzied flight was actually keeping him alive. However, he was going to need proper control in two minutes.
When he was far enough ahead, he took a few precious seconds to stop and trigger a blast door to close before giving his jets a crazed half-second burst and ricocheting away. He watched through his rear monitor as the door ground shut.
“That should slow it down,” he said triumphantly. A second later the door exploded outward, and the nightmare machine tore through a half foot of alien alloy like it was cream cheese. His delaying tactic had bought him less time than he’d used creating it.
“Oh, shit,” he said and used even more jump power. His suit cried in protest as he crashed around a bend, rather than taking it as a corner. He made a conscious effort to be more careful. His running would do him no good if the suit didn’t have integrity when he got to where he was going. According to the station map, his destination was just ahead. “Splunk, I need those haptics!”
“Go,
“Yes,” Jim said as he passed the last blast door, executed a spin and jetted upward. The damned monster was close. Too close! He smashed against the upper edge of the hangar deck and blindly tried to find a handhold. His suit’s alarm sounded; he was almost out of jump juice after the crazy pursuit.
“Jim, is that your transponder in the hangar deck?” Hargrave’s panicked voice came over his radio. “Damn, Captain Su was about to fire—”
“Tell her to shoot!” he screamed.
“What’s going on, Jim?”
The thing glided into the cavernous hangar, slowing via invisible forces, its huge, armored demonic head swiveling to look up at Jim. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck standup as the monster machine maneuvered. Something about how it propelled itself was causing an electrostatic force to interact with him and his suit. One of its four arms moved to track him.
“Fire, just fire!” The arm lined up just as a meter-wide beam of star-brilliant coherent light punched effortlessly through the bay doors.
Jim scrambled for a hold, any kind of hold, as the monstrosity’s head turned toward the beam burning through the bay dozens of meters away. An instant later, the massive bay doors, now compromised and unable to hold the forces in check, exploded outward. The atmosphere of the bay was instantly consumed by the void, taking Jim with it.
* * *
“Daddy, what if I float away?” Jim hung to the handholds surrounding the hatchway. Thaddeus Cartwright floated a few feet away, holding his hands out.
“Remember the grippers?” Jim looked at the hand he wasn’t holding on with, a strap wrapped around his hand and wrist, a small, slightly glowing disk sitting in the middle of his palm. “Just touch the wall anywhere and you’ll stick, just like a fly!” Jim looked at his father, the fear evident. “Come on, Jimbo, you can do it, son!”
“But I’m scared, Daddy.”
“Don’t be. Daddy’s here. Just give one…little…push…” Jim let go and floated to the opposite wall, his father watching keenly. He put out both hands and smacked lightly into the wall, his hands almost sucking down onto the cool metal.
“I did it!” he cheered. Thaddeus Cartwright beamed proudly at his son.
* * *
The explosive decompression ripped at the cavernous chamber, tearing everything, and everyone, toward the yawning abyss. Jim spun, his movements instantly transmitted into thruster impulses by his suit’s haptic computer. He sensed more than saw the support column approaching and threw out a hand. The old memory of his father filled in his mind. One of those seminal moments of his childhood. Aboard Traveler on his first trip into space, Thaddeus Cartwright teaching his physically awkward son to move in zero gravity was fun, once you knew the rules.
As the evacuating atmosphere tried to take him with it, Jim recalled those lessons, and the CASPer had many potential grapple points. The suit he wore was rigged for boarding actions, and he could literally magnetize almost every square inch. As he spun, he used his pinplants to activate the grapple function and the suit became a huge magnet.
He collided with the support shoulder-first, with enough force to deform the massive metal column and slam him against his restraints. He saw stars but didn’t look away from the Tri-V as it showed the alien machine flash past, spinning wildly. It reached out toward him, and an energy bolt flashed only centimeters from Jim’s cockpit, close enough that some of the energy arced and crackled off the suit. A dozen warning lights lit, and the radio was destroyed.
He did his best to wrap his arm around the metal strut. The force of the decompression tried to pull him away, and the horrible scraping of the column against his suit screamed in his ears. Gale forces stronger than the greatest hurricane battled magnetic forces, threatening to pull him into space. With no jump juice remaining and the radio destroyed, there would be no way for Bucephalus to find him amid the storm of debris being ejected into space.
A second later, the maelstrom of escaping wind slowed and finally stopped. Internal doors closed, isolating the loading bay, which was now in vacuum. His CASPer was damaged and leaking air; however, indicators said it would be able to compensate for a while. He felt Splunk moving and knew she would be trying to stop the leaks and—hopefully—fix the radio.
He used the suit’s sensors to look for the alien robot. It had to be a robot, he decided. A deadly machine left as a trap to guard what Jim had found—a cache of data. Only, what kind of cache, and why was it here in the Karma system? The sensors alerted him to an object coming toward him. He activated the minigun on his arm, the only green-lit weapon, and shut down all the magnetic clamps except those on the arm opposite the gun. Come and get me, mother fucker.
Through the ravaged bay doors, a dozen CASPers floated toward him, the lights on their suits casting in all directions. Jim safed the weapon and smiled.
* * *
Jim was strapped to the medical bed, waiting patiently as the ship’s physician examined him. He was covered in bruises from head to toe, and the doc confirmed Jim had a minor concussion as well as several hairline fractures of his left clavicle, the one he’d hit the support with. His suit was in somewhat worse shape. Adayn shook her head in bemusement and set about fixing it.
“You’re sure there was no sign of the thing?” Jim asked.
“Nothing,” Hargrave said. “Captain Su launched drones to search for it. Not a thing.” Jim shook his head in concern. They’d gotten several good images of the thing from his suit’s recorders, including one of his laser beams bouncing off and being partially absorbed. Bucephalus’s shield techs confirmed the effect at least resembled shields, though it looked almost like the shield wasn’t a globe but instead covered the machine only a fraction of an inch above its surfaces, rather like a skin-tight suit made of energy shieldi
ng. “We’ll keep looking, though.”
Jim doubted they’d find it. The machine had flown after him. Whatever strange propulsive force it used was something he’d never seen before. After it was ejected from the station, it must have fled in another direction. It was still out there. “Okay,” he said. “Anything else in the station?”
“Just this,” Hargrave said and held out a slate. On it was a picture of a poorly lit bay. Inside were lines of cradles not too different from the ones they used to hold CASPers, only these were each more than 100 feet tall. Jim smiled and Hargrave shook his head. “That’s why you bought this place, isn’t it? Your little toys.”
“Little?” Jim asked, then laughed. “I was hoping one of these might be an old Raknar handling facility.” Out of the dozens I looked at, what are the odds the only one left after Splunk wrecked my slate was this one? “Have the handling team move Dash here for me.”
“Dash,” Hargrave grumbled, then nodded. He’d never approved of Jim naming the Raknar after a little horsey, as he called it. Jim had reminded Hargrave he wasn’t in charge. “I’ll get it done.”
As Hargrave left, Jim saw Splunk floating by the doorway. The doctor glanced over at the Fae and nodded. “She’s been nearby the whole time we examined you.”
“Give me a minute?” he asked, and the doctor pushed off toward his office, and they were alone. “You saved me,” he said to the Fae, “back in the command center when that thing…”
“Adversary,
“Yes, adversary. When it was in my mind.” She didn’t say anything. “Was it a Kahraman?” She shook her heard. “How do you know it’s an adversary.”
“I know, Jim,
“This isn’t over,” he yelled after her, but there was no reply. Jim plucked the slate Hargrave had left from where it was floating nearby and examined it. They were certainly Raknar frames. Karma Upsilon 4 had been a Raknar-related facility. He grinned and started making plans.
* * * * *
Chapter Two
Jim Cartwright floated in the bay, his eyes half closed as data flowed into his brain through his pinplants. His mind, long accustomed to assimilating data in this manner, worked effortlessly to organize the information. The problem was that he couldn’t make sense out of the majority.
It’s not encrypted, he thought as he froze a particular data packet and broke it down into its principle element strings. No matter how many times he examined it, the information looked like gobbledygook. He set the download to continue, added an alert against the unlikely possibility the data outstripped his storage capacity, and opened his eyes.
The bay had once been intended for maintenance. However, the robotic probe he’d encountered upon boarding Karma Upsilon 4 had changed the space into an intelligence-gathering center. The robot had been incredibly powerful; it had almost killed him and Splunk several times, including when Jim had tried to hack the network it had set up in the station. He didn’t remember how it had ended, only that somehow the alien black ice software had been defeated.
“Quee, quee, quee!” A flapping of wings and a blue-streaked creature shot past. A Teachal. They reminded him of small chickens, only these were of various blue hues, not truly flight-capable, and seemed to only live in space. They also excelled at breaking into things while looking for food. Things like control panels, engineering spaces, and once an air lock mechanism, successfully decompressing an entire station section. Thankfully, it was unoccupied at the time.
“I get you,
“I could use some help with this equipment,” he called after her.
“Later, Jim,
“You there, boss?”
“You bet, Hargrave,” Jim answered. “What’s going on?”
“Transfer shuttle is coming in.”
“Oh, excellent!”
“I thought you’d want to know.”
“Yep. Thanks, Hargrave.” Jim disconnected the cable leading to his pinplants and floated out of the bay.
The station was massive. It had originally been a carbonaceous asteroid, debris left from the ignition of Karma’s star. After drifting for a few billion years, it eventually settled into an orbit some million-odd kilometers from the planet. The planet was settled and became a center of industry, and the asteroid was moved closer to the planet, where it was harvested, and the stripped remains were used to make Upsilon 4.
During Jim’s exploration of the new Cartwright’s Cavaliers base, he’d found it to be somewhat of a labyrinth. The tunnels within the remains of the asteroid were like the meanderings of an ant colony, going every direction imaginable. They would randomly connect, split again, then turn into a dead end.
The facilities built on the outside of the asteroid resembled more common Union designs—or rather, pre-Union designs. There were also a pair of medium-sized gravity rings along the newer part of the station, on the opposite side from the massive cargo bay where Jim had fought the robot. By Jim’s guess, the station could support more than a thousand personnel. Of course, it was the base’s industrial capabilities which really interested him.
The bay doors Bucephalus had destroyed couldn’t be replaced easily. For the time being, the bay was serving as an open-to-space receiving port. When Jim finally arrived and suited up, the massive bulk of a cargo transport was nosing into the bay, a few meters per second. It was likely larger than his warship, and half the ship could fit in the bay.
Dozens of Cavaliers’ employees waited in space suits, hanging onto gantries and various supports throughout the bay, ready for the transfer. Docking was delicate, owing to the fact the asteroid base did possess a tiny amount of gravity. And when you are backing a 500,000-ton freighter into a bay not much bigger than the vessel, even 1/100th of a gravity added a level of complexity to the calculations most pilots simply didn’t appreciate.
Jim watched the last few moments of the docking while holding his breath. The ship couldn’t seriously damage his new station, but it could wreck the hangar. Since it was the only functioning hangar, that could cause problems.
The pilot turned out to be as good as he’d hoped, and the ship settled gently until the bay’s magnetic grapples smacked into place. There was no sound to hear in vacuum, but Jim’s mind imagined a loud clang, and the station and ship became one.
“Transport is secure,” he heard over the station PA.
As soon as the call went out, the transfer crew moved. The transport’s huge clamshell doors swung open, and Jim’s personnel brought over micro-G maneuvering equipment. The packs were strapped onto the cargo and had tiny RCS thrusters, allowing anything from a pallet of food to a CASPer to be moved with ease. Within minutes, a steady stream of gear was moving toward the three permanent airlocks.
The loadmaster from the ship, an alien Maki resembling a lemur, jump/sailed over to grab a protrusion with one foot and addressed him directly via laser link. “The artifact is the last off, sir,” he said. “We wanted to be sure not to damage it.”
“If you can damage it, I’d be amazed,” Jim said and accepted the computer slate. He linked its wireless with his pinplants and ran down the manifest. Everything was there. This was the ninth, and last, load of cargo from his warehouse on Karma Station. They were finally moved in, and Cartwright’s Cavaliers had a new home
while away from Earth.
Jim sent a message to his own stores’ supervisor to verify every pallet and crate matched their company’s serial numbers. As they’d been checking each one as it was offloaded, the reply was almost immediate, and affirmative. In the bay, all his people now had maneuvering units and were flying back to the ship for the last item.
“I’ve seen many of them,” the cargo master said as the huge form began to emerge, carefully controlled by the Cavaliers’ cargo team, “but this one’s the best-appearing by far.”
“I’m rather proud of it,” Jim said with a grin. The Maki loadmaster probably couldn’t see the expression through Jim’s visor, but that didn’t stop him from smiling. Already half the machine’s 100-foot length was out of the ship and being maneuvered into the largest of the cargo locks, which just happened to be big enough.
It was roughly Human-shaped, with shorter legs and longer arms. Though it lacked a head, it still somehow presented an almost simian appearance. Its thick, alloy-armored form was covered in many scars, all carefully patched war wounds. It was predominantly blue, though several sections sported green components, as if they’d been salvaged from another of its kind.
On one shoulder was a seven-foot-tall stylized Cavalier riding a charger, feathered helm trailing behind as if preparing to embed its lance in an enemy. High on its ride side was stenciled “CDR Jim Cartwright,” and on the left was a cartoon pony with wings and a rainbow mane and tail. Jim’s grin got even bigger when he saw it. Hargrave had nearly shit himself white the first time he’d seen it.