MissionSRX: Deep Unknown

by Matthew D. White

  “Okay, Okay! Got it! I’m at the terminal!” Scott rounded the last corner in a dark hallway, filled with the hum from the central power system directly to the rear. The walls were filled with banks of switches resembling small black knobs with a thin sleeve towards each base to cycle them on and off. Pictographs above each set documented which systems they controlled and although the lettering was Lyran he was able to fumble along.

  The guns were all listed on a single diagram with the ability to activate individual batteries or the entire series at once. Scott scanned over the hundreds of knobs, opted for the master, and cranked it hard to the left. Instantly every other knob snapped into place.

  “That’s it! Guns are up!” Scott scanned down the rows of equipment, “Found the controls for the landing bay!”

  “Hold up one second.” Grant chanced a glance back out the door. More of the Cygnans had arrived but more than that, his fighter was only forty meters away; maybe a twelve second sprint. “Can you give me ten seconds and then seal it off?”

  “Yes, sir.” Scott’s hand hovered over the master switch. “Tell me when.”

  Grant braced himself against the frame and dropped the trigger of his rifle. A stream of bullets riding on a booming echo of fire tore unexpectedly across the room. He swept the line of fire across the field before pulling back just as his attackers adjusted and returned in kind.

  He pivoted and sprinted unseen down the side hallway and jumped through the next set of doors to his right, buying him a few precious seconds to reach his fighter. Grant cleared the fuselage before the first Cygnan spied him on the attack.

  He ignored the incoming hail and dove into his seat, spun up the engines and pulled the triggers for the forward guns before the system even logged in. The battery of miniguns under the SR-X’s fuselage whirled to life and breathed a thunderous wall of fire, sending the gathering force of Cygnan invaders diving for cover. “SEAL US OFF!” he shouted to Scott, “Five seconds and drop the leading blast door!”

  The fighter rocked into the air, still trading waves of fire with the gathering aliens while Grant got his bearing. He gunned the engines and strafed halfway out of the bay, turning up enough to tag another incoming shuttle causing it to burst into flames and slam hard into the side wall and then into the deck below. “That’s it! Clear!” he yelled again when the small ship sailed into space beyond.

  Several Cygnan shuttles still buzzed about outside, trying to land despite taking fire from the batteries of cannons spread around the Patriot’s body. Grant tagged another on the high-g turn away and pulled back around the massive battleship towards the lower landing bay. “Sergeant Allen, make some room.”

  Allen looked at O’Hare and shrugged. Their fire team had already been pushed into one of the service hallways just as the rest of the company elsewhere off the bay. “Take all you want. We’ve got nothing there.”

  The sergeant felt the room become bathed in bright light and looked up in time to see a Cygnan soldier standing defiantly above them, its back turned as it reacted to the human fighter rolling in hot.

  “Take cover!” Grant shouted, raking smaller-caliber fire across the field and planting a cannon round into the nearest alien formation.

  The doorway exploded outwards, carrying bits of the creature flying in every direction and kicking a wave of the atmosphere hard enough to knock the humans off their feet. Allen’s ears rang from the blast but he couldn’t help laughing in relief. The brief stay was more than welcome, despite their losses. “Come on! We’ve got to get to the other squads!”

  “Already there.” Grant said while continuing to rain fire down on the other bay exits. “I’ll need some help. A few stragglers are advancing deeper into the ship. You said your guys are holding them back?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Flank the ones on the left.” The commander ordered, “I’ll take the right.”

  Seeing no more movement, Grant dropped the SR-X to the ground, popped his hatch, grabbed his rifle and took a flying leap from the nose of his ship, landing low while already drawn on the dark passage into the Patriot. He saw dim flashes of light above so he ran to catch up to the alien advance.

  The previously white surfaces were now scorched black from explosives and the soot from fires burning out. Stray fire had also caught the lights, resulting in only intermittent occasional flickering from the installed emergency bulbs.

  Sergeant Allen flanked the Cygnans in the second hallway as Grant’s voice overheard their dissipating gunshots. “Sergeant, have your fourth team cease fire. I’m right behind the alien line.”

  Allen considered the soldier beside him but relayed the message on.

  “It’s done, sir.”

  ***

  The trailing fire team took cover behind some bends in the wall as the aliens continued to fire in their direction. In a second’s time, they screeched out, not in defiance but in surprised pain, firing randomly into all sides of the passage before falling silent. The team leader stuck his head out and watched for any other dangers. All he saw emerge from the smoke was the red-suited officer with a rifle hanging loose across his chest and two blood-soaked hatchets in his hands. “We’re all clear on this side!”

  19

  “The bleeding’s started again!”

  Othello looked up from a stretcher carrying a bandaged soldier and ran to the opposite side of the Patriot’s support clinic. The situation was increasingly frustrating as they were surrounded by what must have been some of the most advanced medical equipment ever developed without a single person trained in their use. They had already been through half of what was left of the ship to recover the rest of the crew. Unfortunately, their small deployment of corpsmen was still missing.

  Lieutenant Carter had gone flying in the aftermath of the blast and had almost bled out before the first conscious soldier reached the clinic to patch him up. Earlier upon their arrival, the medics had sealed his arm mostly shut with some Lyran contraption but the wound had again started to open up.

  “Keep pressure on it!” Othello ordered while watching the flowing red liquid stain through a directly-applied pad of white gauze. They needed something more. He glanced around the room, to the rows of cabinets filled with objects he couldn’t describe or identify, much less utilize. Something simpler.

  Reaching down, Othello pulled the belt from a soldier recovering from a head injury. He wrapped the leather band around Carter’s upper arm and cinched it down opposite his primary artery before knotting it tight.

  “I think that’s helping.” The other soldier said while still holding the roll of wadded fabric tightly against Carter’s missing arm.

  “Good,” Othello replied. “I don’t know why they took the first one off. Stick another bandage on it and wrap it up,” he added and continued on to check the other soldiers still recovering from the blast.

  Of the two hundred twenty crew members they started with, nearly seventy were confirmed deceased and the rest were still missing. The entire command deck was gone. Most of the gunners didn’t survive. The service crew was still around, plus most of the defensive forces but they weren’t going anywhere soon.

  The surviving soldiers were spread throughout the ship, still sweeping for survivors but they’d been silent for the previous hour as it was. Without any members of the command crew remaining, those remaining had started to look towards Othello for some form of leadership.

  In a way, it was not unexpected but he wasn’t ready for the shift in responsibility from a combat squad to that of an entire alien battleship full of disaster survivors short of any means of getting out alive. It felt deeply disturbing to have no one else he could turn to, no obvious solutions; they were completely cut off with only the hope that the rest of the fleet would find out what happened and come looking. Othello knew the commanders wouldn’t leave them for dead but searching half the galaxy could easily take months. He didn’t voice the possibility and he decided to avoid the subject unless anyone thought
enough to ask.

  He took his leave and headed back up through the scratched and dented halls of the Lyran ship, for the first time leaving dusty footprints on the floor behind him. Despite their technology, they weren’t indestructible and from what he could tell, weren’t immortal. He didn’t trust a one of them, especially after the engineer’s excitement back near Elysium.

  Climbing back to the edge of the spiral ramp, Othello took a seat at the ragged edge of the blown-out crater that was his ship. He needed a few moments of solitude to try to sort some of it out.

  ***

  Scott tapped the monitor by the wall of override switches. The camera feed switched from the secondary bays below to the main bay above. He was relieved that Commander Grant had escaped from the bay but that still left them with the problem of the multiple shuttle loads of aliens now tearing the room apart. They occasionally opened fire at the doors but their limited handheld arms couldn’t penetrate the walls. He hoped it would be enough to keep them contained for a while longer; at least until the rest of their ground forces finished down on the lower levels.

  The Cygnans moved up to explosives, grenades or whatever else they had carried with them during their evacuation and continued to attack the sealed walls. Scott considered calling them lucky that they didn’t have time to prepare their escape. When they dropped what they were doing and ran towards an area obscured by a crashed shuttle, he only had one thought: they had found Grant’s blown-out hole in the wall.

  “Commander! We’ve got a problem on the main level! They just found the hole you opened for me!”

  “I really don’t care right now!” Grant yelled back over the pounding background sound of sustained rifle fire. “We can’t get up there quite yet. Hold them if you need to but don’t be afraid to fall back! We’ll get there as soon as we can.”

  Scott rolled his head, “got it, sir.” What else needed to be locked down before he moved out again? He cycled camera feeds, hoping to get an idea of what the aliens were up to. He found a shot-up bay on the lower level with Grant’s fighter parked to the side, cannon barrels smoking like the walls around it.

  Another appeared to be in pristine condition and sealed from the elements outside. According to the map, it was on the backside of the command level, a short distance from the bridge. He flipped the hardware switch to seal it off for the remainder of the battle.

  The large access door didn’t seal. Instead, it slid open. Scott did a double-take as the monitor showed the hatch slip aside. He fumbled for the switch again, cursing himself while realizing he had rotated it too far. “No… No… No…” he mumbled as time slowed while the door opened fully before pausing and again started to slide closed.

  While still only a third retracted, two Cygnan shuttles slammed hard into the over-shielded space in twin explosions that send sparks and debris rocketing through the space. A third shuttle tailed them and crashed through in like manner, using the momentary drop as the Patriot’s shield recharged to mask its approach.

  It hit the far wall hard, but intact while the doors closed, once more sealing them in place. Scott didn’t know how to fess up to it but couldn’t let it go unsaid. “We’ve got a landing in the top level bay behind the bridge. They snuck one in while I tried to seal it shut.”

  “Copy that. Are they moving?”

  “No, they’re sealed in place.”

  “Leave them.” Grant commanded, “We’ve only got a few more down here and we’ll move on the main formation.”

  Scott pulled the shield off his face and wiped a line of sweat away from his brow before the stinging droplets made their way to his eyes. He didn’t have an angle on where the rest of them were going and he couldn’t wait any longer. Maybe it was his way of paying for his sin.

  He didn’t expect the ones on the command deck to be a major danger for the moment; he was more concerned with the ones that now had the run of the landing bay and the body of the ship. Not wanting to badger the commander when he still had his hands full, Scott tried to think of a plan to help out. Somehow.

  The largest formation of Cygnans was still likely the ones in the bay and thus the most dangerous. He wasn’t worried about defending the mainframe beside him, but the probe launcher had to be secured. At this point it was their only method to call for reinforcements or at the very least, let Fox and the others know where they were.

  Scott dropped the shield across his face once more and checked the security systems for any additional movement. Multiple additional hallways ran down the gigantic ship on every side to move personnel and equipment. He tried to judge where the Cygnans were and where they were likely to move. He started locking corridors and hatches to keep them contained. The Lyran structures were durable but they weren’t invincible. Hopefully they’d last long enough for Grant secure the lower levels.

  The engineer’s fear masked his frustration while he tried to find the relevant commands on the tiny screen. If the command deck was staffed up, it would have taken a dedicated operator only a few seconds with a proper terminal to lock the ship down correctly. He checked the cameras twice to confirm he hit them all and headed back up to the probe room.

  The twenty or so now-sealed corridors in the body of the Patriot necessitated Scott now forge a new route to the front of the ship. Instead of moving straight for his destination, he took a side hall out into the fuselage’s port side extrusion. The long portion of the hull served as an extensive engineering facility and provided the deck space for their massive defensive cannons to each side. Even though the supporting frame and superstructure took up a substantial percentage of volume, there were still dozens of kilometers of passages between the myriad of stations.

  While they would normally be bustling centers of activity during a real conflict, they were eerily silent as there was no crew to command the posts. Once he reached the next main thoroughfare, Scott opted for another sliding tram instead of subjecting himself to another hour-long run. He dropped the simple control and shot forward at top speed for the thin metallic surface.

  ***

  Othello rocked back and forth on the shredded crag of metal in the midst of the Patriot’s crater. It went without saying that he had never felt so alone. The only artificial light came from the few contingency bulbs that still flickered on the ship, along with the last escaping plumes of ionized plasma.

  Above, the unfiltered luminescence of the universe shone bright, unhindered by a wisp of atmosphere. Together a billion stars formed the brilliant arm of an unnamed spiral galaxy, rotating slowly above the insignificant metal can of a ship.

  While he seemed only an arm’s length away from the structure above, Othello knew that there was no reaching such beauty in this world. Without a sense of scale for comparison, he knew the constellation above was beyond all consideration; that to try and fly to it would result in a hundred lifetimes of agonizing drifting through absolute nothingness, only to never reach a destination.

  Meanwhile with the help of the Lyrans, they could pass such things within a casual blink and never see them nor feel their light. With a ship like theirs, all of the wonders of the universe became a mere obstacle in the firmament on the way to an infinitesimally small destination, a congealed ball of rock here or there that for a mutually agreed upon reason held more hope than the rest of the creation. To understand such a relationship was beyond all but the most enlightened philosopher and to accept such a position would cause anyone to skirt pure madness.

  His mind continued to wander within and without the predicament. It floated to the colony and his stack of reading material of engineering, history, fiction and philosophy. From the depths of his heart, he found himself mumbling quotes from millennia past:

  "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in th
e very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague."

  He pulled his mind back. Cicero. First century B.C. Roman orator. There was little greater truth than that human nature never changed. The premonition was disturbing. Why would he pull that out from the stack of books he had left abandoned in his meager Martian apartment? Was his own crew to blame?

  Having caught his breath and not wanting to dwell on the big picture any longer, Othello prepared to return to the clinic and help put some more of his people back together. A flash of light caused him to pause and he gazed into the darkness to see a new spec of light appear, distinct from the others. Another Patriot had arrived.

  Othello first heard a hushed discussion from the bridge of the other ship between the various parties trying to determine what they were seeing. Through thick static, one voice emerged among the others.

  “Derelict Patriot, this is Lieutenant Neal Sebastian, United Space Corps. If you can hear me, please respond on primary transmission channel.”

  Othello took the initiative and hit the transmit key on his radio. “This is Othello Harris, defensive support commander. We have sustained heavy damage of unknown origin resulting in the loss of all vehicle power along with most of the command crew. We have multiple wounded and K.I.A.’s resulting from an onboard explosion. Require immediate assistance!”

  “Othello, thank God you’re alright!” Sebastian replied, “it looks like someone just cut away a quarter of your ship with a gaddamn shovel!”