Star Carrier (Lost Colonies Trilogy Book 3)

by B. V. Larson

  “You’re saying they’re manned by variants?” I asked.

  “That’s right, Captain. We’ve found the enemy.”

  -31-

  The next twenty minutes were intense. We fired a continuous series of volleys, but we connected only six more times. The enemy was almost close enough to return fire, and they still had ninety percent of their force intact.

  “Give us the specs,” I ordered Vogel. “Feed everything you know about these fighters into Durris’ computer.”

  “I will do so,” he said, “even though I’m under orders not to comply with such a request. This design has been top secret from the beginning—I’m sure you know that, Captain.”

  “I do. I’m glad you agree the situation has changed dramatically.”

  It was odd to watch these fighters roar toward us on full-burn. They’d been designed by our best engineers. They’d been developed with the specific purpose of destroying the Stroj fleets. Now, ironically, they were after us.

  Fortunately, there were less than a hundred of them all told. That was a relatively small number. Iron Duke reportedly carried thousands.

  “Get those decoys out early, Durris,” I said. “Looking at these specs, I’d guess they can put in one more burst of speed for the final approach.”

  “Got it, sir. Pumping out smart-chaff now.”

  The ship’s tanks gurgled and thumped. Billions of nano particles were pumped out around us, forming a cloud of microscopic interceptors. They weren’t enough to stop an incoming missile, but they might cause one to detonate early. Against beams, they served to thin the power of particle radiation or lasers lessening their powerful impact.

  On the hull, dozens of small guns rose up and began auto-tracking the incoming fighters. If they got in close enough, these point-defense weapons would be our best tools. They’d fill the space around our vessel with low-powered, short range pulses of energy. The small cannons couldn’t damage a large vessel, but they could destroy a missile—or a fighter.

  “We’ve gotten sixteen hits so far, Captain,” Durris said. “But they’re now close enough to shoot back.”

  “Warn all decks. Prepare for damage control. Place medical on alert for casualties. I want everyone in a vac suit, faceplates down.”

  My crew scrambled to obey.

  “You don’t really expect them to breach our hull, do you, Captain?” Yamada asked me in concern.

  “They’ve surprised us more than once. I’m not going to underestimate them again.”

  We didn’t have long to wait after that. The hull began to shudder with small impacts. At first, it was hardly more than what we could expect to feel from the firing of our own cannons—but then it rapidly intensified.

  Like a rainstorm that starts with a pattering then grows into a roar, we soon felt as if we were an earthen barrier being eroded by heavy rain.

  “Such accuracy…” Durris said in awe. “They’re landing all these shots, from four directions, on an area only a few meters wide.”

  “They must be going for a direct hull-breach,” I said. “How long is it until they penetrate, and we start venting?”

  “Six minutes sir—I think. They’ll be in close by then. This pass will be half over.”

  “Captain?” Rumbold called to me. “Since they aren’t going for the engines, do I have permission to roll us over?”

  I thought about it. The usual target of any enemy was the engines, but these variants were going straight for a kill-shot rather than trying to cripple us first. It was either a foolish choice or a chilling prediction of the ultimate outcome.

  “Granted, Rumbold, roll us,” I said.

  He didn’t wait around. The ship began a sickening roll, and the damaged part of our hull quickly moved out of the enemy view. Unfortunately, the heavy-rain sound never ceased. It was now something like sizzling bacon. It set my teeth on edge to hear it.

  “They’re focusing on another spot,” Durris said.

  “Durris, pump out more chaff directly over our sore spot.”

  The tanks sloshed and groaned. The sound of incoming fire muted somewhat but didn’t stop.

  “We’ve got a target-lock confirmed from our point-defense!” Durris said. “Permission to strategically clear the chaff?”

  It was a fateful moment. If I signaled our smart-chaff to break holes between us and the fighters, we’d hit more targets, but we’d also leave ourselves more open to counterattacks.

  “Do it,” I said. My eyes turned to watch every screen at once, darting from one to the next.

  The effect of my command was dramatic. Our point-defense cannons were smart, like every other system aboard, so they’d been holding their fire up until this moment. Each gun had computed that it couldn’t get a kill firing through our own defensive curtain. But now that the chaff was drifting away from the ship, they opened up firing through the clear spots.

  Hits began to register. Nineteen more enemy fighters were transformed into fireballs within thirty seconds.

  A ragged cheer went up from the tactical teams. I didn’t join them. The enemy still had over fifty percent of their force left, and they were getting very close now.

  A sudden thought occurred to me. “Durris, plot their individual trajectories.”

  He did so without questioning me. Numerous red splines appeared. All of them curved slightly, and all of them intersected our ship at a point in the near future.

  I stared at that. It wasn’t normal. The usual approach of fighters was to either make a series of high passes, or to slow down and pound a ship at close range. In either case, slowing down at the end of a run was standard practice.

  These fighters weren’t slowing down at all.

  “They’re going to spend a half-hour turning around,” Durris said, baffled.

  “No, they’re not... They’re planning to ram us. That’s why they’ve been trying to create a weak spot on our hull.”

  “Oh… If they can shove just one of their nosecones into our guts…” Durris said. He looked at me then, and I saw the light of fear in his eyes.

  We’d made a mistake. We’d assumed we were fighting normal, human opponents. But variants didn’t have much in the way of self-preservation in their circuitry. They only wanted to accomplish their mission any way they could.

  “Rumbold!” I boomed. “Get us out of here!”

  “Uh—yes, Captain! Hold on!”

  Red lights flashed, warning the crew, but I knew it was too late. There would be no time to get to an acceleration couch, or even to strap in. All over the ship, there would be injuries—possibly even deaths.

  The first lurch of power sickened me. Then, it got worse. The engines roared and my face began to sag. A staffer, caught off-guard, was thrown to the floor. She rolled away to the back of the chamber, her helmet thumping as she made each full revolution.

  “Stop firing the cannons,” I ordered Durris, who was still clinging to his table. “Give full power to the engines.”

  He complied, and the thrust increased by another thirty percent. We were all crushed by the centrifugal force.

  The computers were unaffected. They continued to calmly depict the external action. Our smart-chaff was left in a cloud of vapor. We were unshielded, but slipping away from the enemy.

  They responded with the speed of vipers. Turning and applying their own surge of thrust, they followed us—and they continued to gain.

  “They’re right on our tails, Captain!” Rumbold wheezed. “I can’t shake them!”

  “They must have a limited fuel supply,” I said through gritted teeth. “Keep up this thrust. Pump more chaff out in a cloud behind us.”

  A massive trail of reflective particles began growing in our wake. The strikes from the enemy lasers lessened then faded away.

  “We’re pulling away, sir!” Rumbold said, then had a coughing fit that ended with a strangling sound.

  I looked around the deck. Several of my people had lost consciousness. Durris was among them. He was still
at his station, slumped over at an odd angle in his harness.

  “Ease down,” I ordered Rumbold. “Medical, sweep the ship. Get to anyone whose implant is in emergency-mode. Put the command crew at the head of that list.”

  The enemy fighters were steadily falling farther behind. They’d exhausted their fuel reserves. They were still firing after us, but they lacked the acceleration to catch us again. They would have to limp back to base and refuel.

  Several things were now clear, the most important of which was the suicidal nature of this new foe. I vowed not to underestimate them again.

  We came about over the next hour, trailing them as they returned slowly toward the broken husk of what had once been Tranquility Station.

  None of them made it home. We mercilessly destroyed every last one of them.

  -32-

  The post-mortem of the attack on this system was a lengthy process. I assembled my best advisors for a round-table analysis of the whole mess.

  “As best we can tell, the Earth fleet passed through here,” Yamada said, “but used a different path through the bridges.”

  “I don’t care how they got here,” I said, “I want to know where they went next.”

  “Right… that’s unclear. There’s so much radiation blasting this system it’s hard to follow a month old trail. We’ll have to guess.”

  “Very well,” I said, “what’s your best guess?”

  She squirmed. Yamada was my science officer, but she wasn’t a wizard. I’d asked her for information she probably couldn’t produce. Still, I could tell she wanted to have a good answer—after all several million people had died here. An entire colony.

  “Captain,” she said after a moment’s hesitation, “I know that emotions are running high. I know the Connatic meant a lot to you—”

  “Lieutenant Commander Yamada,” I said firmly. “If you don’t have an answer, just say so.”

  If the truth be told, my memories of the Connatic were haunting my deeper thoughts. My restored relationship with Lady Chloe put a whole different light on things, but I’d had a significant romance with the leader of this colony the last time I was here. Emotions notwithstanding, my training forced the outrage to stay in check. We had a mission to execute.

  “I have no answer, Captain.” Yamada dropped her gaze. “We can’t know the truth without sifting through the wreckage at length hoping to find a surviving digital recording… something like that.”

  I nodded slowly.

  Durris, still amped on medical stims, jumped in then. His voice rang with alarm. “Captain, I don’t think we can spare the time. They’re already dead, and we’ve got our orders.”

  Glancing at him briefly, I let my eyes go back to Yamada.

  “I’m well aware of the situation, Commander Durris, thank you. Yamada, have you got anything else?”

  She shook her head in defeat. We had not found a single survivor. The variants had infested a relatively undamaged portion of the smashed space station, set up a fighter launch bay and waited here in ambush. Eventually, we’d entered the system and been attacked.

  In the long run, I had no doubt my crew would remember the fine people and hospitality of Gi, but this system was now a dead scrap heap. The clock was ticking and there was an enemy to kill.

  “Director Vogel,” I said, turning to face him, “what’s your theory about this trap? Why did the variants set it?”

  “I… they probably wanted to make sure every last human in this system was dead.”

  “Right, I agree. They’re thorough creatures by nature. They don’t like to leave a job half-done—or even ninety-nine percent done.”

  “You don’t think they knew we’d be coming?” Morris interjected.

  He normally stayed quiet at these meetings as his expertise involved ground missions. Today, however, I welcomed any input I could get.

  “Yes, what about that angle?” I turned back to Yamada and Durris. “Could they have been left here specifically to intercept us?”

  “Unlikely, sir,” Durris said. “How would they know we were coming?”

  “It’s not impossible,” Director Vogel said. “This system is close to Earth. Many paths from Earth to the colonies pass through it. The battleship Victory was sent toward Earth to destroy Defiant—or maybe it escaped the mutiny and later succumbed. In either case, the variants had to know that they may be pursued.”

  “But why would they weaken their fighter strength?” Durris demanded. “It makes no sense. Placing a hundred fighters here gives them that many less to defend the carrier.”

  Director Vogel launched a single index finger into the air. “Ah,” he said, “you don’t know all of Iron Duke’s capacities. The carrier, manned by variants, is able to build new fighters to replace the old. They have an in-flight construction bay. I think it’s likely they dropped off their surplus units here.”

  “And the variant pilots?” I asked. “Are they being replaced as well?”

  He nodded crisply, with certainty. I could tell he had great pride in the monsters he’d created even when they were at their worst. “Yes, as long as the necessary resources are available.”

  “You mean people that can be brainwashed, cut apart and built into machines against their will.”

  “Must you speak so crassly about the genius that has…?”

  “That’s wonderful,” Morris interrupted. “We wasted ammo on these guys. They’re slowing us down with every hour we fart around in this system. I suggest we move on, Captain.”

  “Following our original course?” I asked.

  He shrugged. The rest agreed without enthusiasm. All of us were demoralized by the loss here. A colony had been swept away. Worse, it was a colony friendly to Earth. Possibly, the Gi people had been the only humans in the universe that would have called Earthmen their friends.

  “I agree with Morris,” I said at last. “We’re pulling out in one hour. Meeting adjourned.”

  No one objected. They got to their feet and returned to their stations.

  Defiant hadn’t been badly damaged in the battle, but after violent action it was standard operating procedure to review and consult checklists for every system aboard. One hour would be cutting it short for my officers. I let them move on to their work.

  * * *

  We left Gliese-32 in a sober mood. Weeks passed quickly. After crossing more bridges, we discovered two star systems that were new to us.

  They were just as lifeless as Gi had been. Both possessed natural beauties to behold, to be sure, but nothing living. Nothing threatening, either.

  Today we sighted what was to my mind the most intriguing natural wonder of all. A pair of crystalline planets orbited one another in perfect synchronicity. They were twins, both of them haunting beauties covered in cold, sparkling spikes.

  Encrusted with blue ice, they stretched and crackled due to their mutual gravitational forces. These forces inevitably melted the surface in spots and drew spikes of fresh-melted liquids from both cores. The spikes then refroze into blue crystal mountains.

  We passed these planets in their eternal frozen embrace. Just beyond them, we found another breach and headed for it, not knowing what we’d find inside or at the far end.

  My worries continued to haunt me. My gut was telling me to press on, but my doubts were almost as strong.

  Was I a madman to be out here, chasing phantoms? With each jump, we were getting farther from home. We’d trusted the word of a dying Stroj with the lives of my entire crew.

  With each jump, my tension grew. This series of jumps had at least been hinted at on the Connatic’s maps—but not so the next one. The next one would truly be the first blind, blue jump of my career. On every previous flight, I’d at least had a hint as to what was on the far side or some evidence that the way was safe.

  The breach loomed ahead, and I found I couldn’t take my eyes off it. My crew was transfixed as well, silent and foreboding.

  To our knowledge, no one had ever passed throug
h this next breach.

  It could very well be that the dead Stroj we were relying on was laughing in Hell at us as we followed his map. Had he played an elaborate prank from the grave? Were we about to be exposed to deadly radiation, an inescapable gravitational force, or simply a planetary mass so close to the exit that there was no hope of evasion?

  We had no way of knowing what was ahead, but we flew into the wormhole all the same, and we vanished without a trace.

  -33-

  Instant death didn’t await us once we’d found the exit to the bridge. This left me mildly surprised. I’d calculated that if the Stroj had been engaged in a careful act of deceit, this would have been the perfect point to spring his deadly surprise.

  What of the other jump points on the list? Were they window-dressing? Had they only been scrawled there to put us off our guard? Logically, it would be the first blue-jump, the first jump into the total unknown, that would be our undoing. The rest of the coordinates were only included to give us false hope.

  But that wasn’t how it played out. The trip here hadn’t been easy, to be sure. This last bridge in particular didn’t want to give up its secrets. We’d searched for an unusually long time, but we’d eventually found the exit.

  “Data is coming in now, Captain,” Yamada said. Her voice was professional, but she sounded stressed. She knew the stakes and the odds as well as I did—perhaps better.

  “Display everything you have as soon as it’s confirmed,” I said.

  “Coming on screen now.”

  We could all see as a group that we were in a single-star system. Most stars were multiples in our galactic neighborhood. The star in question was a dwarf but a relatively bright one.

  Staring at it with narrowed eyes, I stepped closer to the screens. One by one, the local litter of planets were being detected and displayed on the holo-maps.

  “Captain…” Durris said, “we have a ninety-percent match-up already. Can you guess where we are?”

  I nodded. “As a matter of fact, I thought I recognized it. A young star, with no gas giant to clean up the outer system debris… this is Beta Cygnus, if I don’t miss my guess.”