Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  Come on. I stared through the wealth of information on the HUD as I concentrated on the alien ship itself. I needed somewhere tasty. Somewhere that would do some real damage on that sonovabitch.

  There: a docking bay. Fighters streamed in and out, shielded from Defiant’s fire by the bulk of the ship. And if fighters were going in for turnaround, then maybe a torpedo could too.

  Decision made.

  “Follow me, I’m going in.”

  I swept the Hellcat around in a long curving course. The dock went from an elongated rhomboid to a rectangle as we charged towards the bay. The targeting computer placed a box over the space. I could see the beetle shape of the fighters, hell, I could see the specks of the aliens themselves flittering between them. A warble filled my ears, becoming more urgent as the torpedo received the telemetry telling it just where it needed to go.

  The warble turned to an insistent beeping. “I have tone. Fox Five.”

  I pulled the trigger. The torpedo streaked ahead of my fighter on a blue exhaust, even as I swung away in a punishing turn. Around me, the tattered remnants of my adopted squadron starburst away in different directions, trying to escape from the withering return fire.

  I looked over my shoulder, my neck aching with the effort, just in time to see an explosion surge out of the docking bay.

  “Good hit, good hit.”

  The alien ship rolled away from Defiant, striving to disengage from battle as a geyser of flame spurted from the ruins of the bay. It was doubtful my hit had been terminal. Unless those aliens were idiots, they wouldn’t put anything critical anywhere near the docking area, but it was clearly more than a mere annoyance to the huge ship.

  “All remaining craft. Return to base. I repeat, RTB,” Hayes’ voice called out. “It’s time to bug out.”

  I dared a glance over my shoulder at the tumbling chunks of High York. We didn’t have a base any more.

  “Fighter controllers will be giving you the closest berth out this mess,” Hayes called, answering my unasked question. An illuminated outline appeared around Defiant itself. “The fleet will be going to displacement in one minute. If you’re not in a bay by then, you’re staying, and good luck with that.”

  Shit. One minute was nothing. I wrenched my Hellcat around and slammed the throttle forwards. The bloodied and broken flank of Defiant flashed by as I circled her, ready to put down. From above, I could see the flashes of incoming weapons fire from two more huge ships, each the size of the one we’d just fended off, as they maneuvered into position. All around, the fighters who had taken part in this last stand flocked, striving to reach the safety of a jump-capable ship. I flinched as another exploded under the withering fire from the incoming battleships.

  The landing bay bloomed in size in front of me. This was going to be one hell of a hot landing.

  At the last possible second, I hauled back on the throttle. It slammed past its stops, activating the thrust reversers. Flame surged past my cockpit as I raced through the shimmering haze of the bay field.

  The air within the bay took on a viscous property as my fighter careened through layer upon layer of integrity fields, each shaving a few precious meters a second off my velocity. But the bulkhead at the end of the bay was approaching damn fast.

  I was in the hands of fate. I drew my hands to my head in a vain effort to ward off the metal wall which approached at the speed of a Hyperloop train. I closed my eyes. This is it, Cunning. Not a blaze of glory, but an ignoble splat.

  I smashed forward against my harness, the straps cutting into my already brutalized chest. The whine of the engines automatically began to spool down.

  I opened one eye, then the other. The bulkhead touched the nose of my fighter. I gave a long exhalation of breath as I pulled the sweaty helmet from my head and popped the canopy.

  Slowly, I climbed down the side of my fighter on shaky legs. My body ached from the punishing it had undertaken. I was definitely getting too old for this kind of thing.

  The bay was virtually empty. Not more than a dozen fighters had made it into a space designed for a hundred, and all of them were scarred, and held a variety of squadron markings. We’d all been directed to whatever ship had happened to be closest when the withdrawal was signaled. I looked around in vain for Hayes’ fighter.

  Damnit. He wasn’t here. I could only hope he’d been directed to one of the other ships.

  Behind the line of fighters, still smoking from the heat of their engines, I could see the huge bay doors rumbling closed. The swirling mist of the displacement drive visible beyond. We were moving, fleeing from Sol. Fleeing from our home.

  And God only knew where we were going.

  *

  Red illuminated smoke filled Defiant’s corridors. Sirens wailed and sparks cascaded down from ruptured power lines. The place was like the surreal vision of a technological hell.

  And I didn’t have a clue where to go.

  A hand gripped my elbow. “Sir, you one of the fighter jocks we picked up?”

  I coughed through the smoke. “Used to be.”

  “Used to be?”

  “A fighter jock. Long story. Where am I going,” I looked at the man’s insignia on his filthy working dress, “chief?”

  “Wait, I know you. You’re Commander Cunningham? From the FCF?”

  “That’s me.” My eyes were streaming from the atmosphere. Frankly, I just wanted to go somewhere I could breathe. This smoke was killing me.

  “What was your ship?” The chief clicked his fingers as he strived to remember.

  “Ranger, chief.” I helped him out. “Look, I’m getting slowly asphyxiated here, where the hell am I going?”

  “Sorry, sir. If you’re off an FCF explorer ship.” He pulled me around and started walking me down the corridor. “I reckon the captain might want to pick your brains.”

  We made our way through the dimly lit corridors, working around fallen stanchions, bustling repair crews, and medics working on desperately injured people. Defiant had taken a hell of a pummelling in her last exchange. She wouldn’t have lasted much longer, that was for damn sure.

  The bridge doors opened with a grinding judder. The expansive chamber was just as battle-damaged as the rest of the ship. The officers and enlisted struggled to work on shattered consoles. The main view screen had a crack running from floor to ceiling, disrupting the view of the swirling whirlpool of a ship under displacement drive. The holo table in the center of the room showed a flickering wireframe representation of Defiant. It looked like there wasn’t a single green of an undamaged section amid the flashing red and yellow covering her kilometer-long length.

  “Captain, I have Commander Cunningham here,” the chief announced. “From the FCF.”

  The woman before me had a dirt-streaked face, and her eyes were red from the stinging acrid atmosphere. She looked far too young to be the captain of a battlewagon.

  “Commander.” She gripped my hand firmly before turning and barking orders at an officer on the engineering station. Something about plugging a hull breach. “I’m Commander…” She paused a second. “Captain Tamara West.”

  I frowned in sympathy at her unspoken loss. At Defiant’s loss. “Captain. I’m here to offer what small service I can.”

  “Any help is welcome right now.” She gave a flicker of an appreciative smile. “We’ll be coming up to the rally point in a few minutes.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what the fleet’s procedures were for this eventuality. Hell, less than twenty-four hours ago, I was fully expecting to be in the bar by now after coming home from an exploration gig. It made sense in the circumstances, though. Withdraw, form up, then get going to a place of safety.

  Speaking of which…

  “Captain, what is our ultimate destination?”

  She looked down, uncertainty crossing her face. Then she gestured at a drying brown puddle on the deck. “This all happened so fast, Commander. Captain Marum was given the coordinates of our destination system as we were he
ading into the fight.”

  “And, let me guess, it wasn’t written down?”

  “He had explicit orders not to, Commander, for reasons of operational security.” West frowned. “If our ship was captured, then the only person who could jeopardize the fall-back colony would be Hamza—Captain Marum. And he wouldn’t have given it up.”

  Colony? Shit. We weren’t rallying up to gather our strength to fight back… we were gathering to flee. But we’d need somewhere to flee to. The one thing I’d learned from my time in the FCF was that space was a congested, dangerous place.

  “You say we’re going to a rally point? Rally points suggest we’re rallying with someone. Do any of them—”

  “We were the assigned lead ship. No one else has the coordinates.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit indeed.” She nodded in agreement.

  “Captain, we’re coming in to ingression,” the helmsman called. “Three, two, one.”

  Defiant slammed out of displacement. I gripped the rail surrounding the holo table as I felt the deck shift under me. The transition compensators must’ve been knocked out of tune in the fighting. An icy world loomed through the window displays. I immediately recognized that our rally point was over Sedna. I glanced through the rear display. Yes, behind us lay Sol, reduced to little more than a pink star, her tortured light thirteen hours old out here in the frozen reaches of the outer Solar System.

  The holo table switched to tactical mode. The display began to populate with a scattering of ships. Some, like Defiant, were displacement-capable military craft. Many of them looked as battered from the fierce fighting as Defiant must have. The majority were civilian vessels, a veritable ragtag fleet of freighters and passenger ships. And there I saw a twinkling transponder, and for the first time in this horrible day, felt my heart lift. Ranger. My old ship.

  The reunion was going to have to wait, though.

  “Captain, if those… aliens, whoever the hell they are, managed to get our vector when we displaced, they’re not going to be far behind. We need a destination.”

  West gritted her teeth, the weight of her recent rise to command already bearing heavily down on her shoulders. “I’m a tactical officer on a battlewagon. The only coordinates I have are in systems which are likely under attack even now.”

  I clutched her shoulder – reassuringly, I hoped. “Look, we need to move fast, but you aren’t on your own here. Call a general fleetwide conference. I may have only returned after a couple of decades, but I can’t imagine operational security has improved that much. Maybe one of the other ships has the coordinates, or failing that, another rally point where we can join up with someone else.”

  She gave a tight nod. “Lieutenant Tsang, signal the other ships. Now.”

  *

  My smile at seeing Tyler Rhodes, who had taken command of Ranger, appear in the conference had given way in the last few minutes to frustration.

  Any second, a swarm of alien ships could drop out of displacement on top of us and these idiots were bickering and giving recriminations. A collection of talking heads floated over the holo table, each one of the captains of the ships gathered with us. And none of them seemed able to agree with the others.

  “— those coordinates are an identified habitable world, well outside our current sphere, which has been carefully assessed as to its suitability and safety. We can’t just go to any old planet. Chances are the invaders will already be there!”

  “Captain La Cross, you are telling us what we already know,” West growled. Her uncertainty had grown into anger, a formidable anger which gave even me pause.

  “Well, why the hell did he not at least write them down?”

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose. This must have been the fastest formation of a next-morning jury in the history of the galaxy. And the shortest lived, if uninvited guests decided to drop in.

  “Security, I told you. We’ve been through this. Three times,” West said cuttingly. “This way, if it looked like he was going to be captured, he could just put a bullet in his own brain, and not have to go looking for his notebook first.”

  “Enough,” I snapped. What little patience I had gave out. I was tired, bruised, and frankly more than a little shell-shocked in going from a nice cruise home to the end of the world in less than a day. “Ranger is loaded with the original and second wave FCF exploration coordinates. She probably holds the most extensive list of potential destinations outside the immediate human sphere. Tyler. Give us a review.”

  Tyler had been uncharacteristically quiet through the meeting, likely prompted by the fact I’d sent him a direct message asking for him to come out with a review of possible destinations.

  “We have a few possibles on the original long-range mission list. Tabby’s Star was an interesting one. There’s rumors the AI came home from that one using the ship’s com bomb, ranting about finding a Dyson sphere out there.”

  Yeah, I’d heard those rumors too. The crew of the Halifax had all been killed by the occupants of said Dyson sphere. No, as curious as I was to see such a sight, it wasn’t for us. “We don’t need interesting. We need stable. No. Next.”

  “51 Pegasi—”

  “They encountered hostiles there. Next.”

  “Cygnus?”

  “A graveyard.”

  “Kkeke—”

  “Occupied already,” I interrupted.

  “Pretty much the rest are confirmed as hostile, or uninhabitable for a variety of reasons.”

  Yeah, the galaxy really didn’t lend itself to an inquisitive new species just venturing out of its home system.

  An idea started forming in my mind. Something crazy. I almost immediately disregarded it.

  Almost.

  Could it work? Maybe. Maybe not. But to give it a go, we would have to venture far beyond the edge of human space. Besides, the aliens had already been there and wiped it clean. Surely the last thing they’d expect would be anyone going back to those ruins.

  I looked at the gathered ships. Factory vessels, mining tugs, even a CHON ship. Yeah, we had everything we needed for my idea.

  And besides, even if the plan A that I’d started to cultivate fell down, then we would be far from home and no one would find us. Plan B could be just to find a hospitable world out there.

  “Okay, I do have one idea from the original FCF list. It’s a hell of a punt, but I think the idea has legs…”

  I began explaining my idea. More than one eyebrow raised among the other captains, probably in disbelief. ‘Ambitious’ wasn’t the word for what I was proposing. But if it did work —

  “Ma’am, we have displacement drives coming in,” Tsang bellowed from his station. “They’re here!”

  A strobing series of flashes washed through the tactical displays as West shouted, “General quarters!”

  Red light washed through the bridge. A dull rumble permeated through Defiant as she came around. More flashes came, ships spilling out of displacement drives. On the tactical display, the alien fleet had finely honed its jump. It was interspersed with our ships, flashes of weapons fire already ripping across our displays. We couldn’t even concentrate our defenses in this mess; friend and foe were mixed in together.

  I turned to look at the holo table. The screaming face of Captain La Cross flickered and disappeared. God damn it, if we just jumped, they would pursue us again. We needed to throw them off the scent.

  “Get all ships to perform an immediate jump for the Pluto - Charon system,” I called across the wail of klaxons to West. She glanced at me, uncertainty on her face. She was looking for someone to give her an objective. I made an executive decision. “Then immediate jump for Tau Sagittarii. We have to be gone from Pluto before they follow. Engage immediately, Tamara, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  West gave a tight nod, then began barking orders as the ship bucked and groaned under the incoming weapons fire. “Helm, line us up on Pluto and immediately execute. Get us out of here.”

  D
efiant ponderously swung around, lining up on the distant ice world. More of our ships exploded as the alien fleet tore them apart like a pack of wolves. Then came the first flash of a ship going to FTL. Then another. Then another.

  “Engaging.”

  A bright light flashed through the displays.

  *

  “Morning, Commander.”

  I opened my eyes. The light was piercing, cutting into my retinas. I immediately blinked them closed again.

  “Lights,” I croaked through unused vocal chords. “Off. Hurts.”

  “They already are. Give it a moment, you’ll adjust.”

  My body began to rapidly cool in the gel-filled cryogenic creche. The temptation to fall back into blissful unconsciousness was nearly irresistible.

  But I couldn’t.

  Mustering all my energy, I opened my eyes again. This time, the light didn’t seem nearly as bad. I blinked a few more times as my vision sorted itself out. Yes, the hazy silhouette of a person hadn’t been practicing a cruel joke on me. The lights were as low as they could go while still allowing the medical staff to work on thawing me out.

  “Are… are we there?”

  My eyes regained the ability to focus. In front of me, the figure resolved into Captain West, only she was older. Years older.

  “We’re there, Brad.” West gave a thin smile. The crow’s feet around her eyes told me volumes. Defiant had taken hits in her cryogenic bays, leaving only enough intact creches for a third of the crew, a few hundred out of the thousand-strong surviving complement. That meant the rest had to cycle through in ten-year-long watches for the thirty-year journey to Tau Sagittarii.

  All of those, that was, except a few who were deemed too important at this end of our journey.

  Like me, apparently. I’d been unceremoniously told I was going under for the whole stretch. Frankly, whether I wanted to or not.

  I pulled myself into a seated position and took a hand towel from her. “And the rest of the ships?”