Spinward Fringe Broadcast 6: Fragments

by Randolph Lalonde

  "Seal up! Affix your soles!" Major Cumberland ordered. His men were the first to react, and were ready, rifles in hand, secured to the deck with their suits sealed up and vacuum ready before half of Colonel Ratner's were.

  Three of the heavy armour units weren’t quick enough to affix their boots to the hull and were sucked right off the deck and out of the largest of the hatches. Most of the soldiers on the embarkation ramp were swept out into open space one after another, as though they were roped together. Cumberland just shook his head. Heavy armour units were always vacuum sealed, so they would survive, but they would be out of action for minutes or longer while they used their tiny emergency thrusters to return to the ship and get back on the deck. The rest, the regular soldiers, would have to be retrieved if they sealed their armour in time. The dark dust cloud they were in would make it difficult, many would be lost.

  "What's going on Major?" asked the Colonel’s second in command. "You've been here for hours, what do you think they're doing?"

  "I can't say; this is new." Major Cumberland signalled his unit to spread out to his right and left using hand signals, and they reacted as though they were marionettes tied to his fingers.

  "Right! Spread out! Find cover where you can!" ordered Colonel Ratner.

  Major Cumberland knelt and looked down his rifle sight, scanning the way ahead. No one else seemed to notice that the transparent emergency bulkheads separating the deck into sections were being drawn aside and down. The whole deck would be open in seconds, something was happening.

  "What should we be expecting, Major? What are we looking for?" asked Ratner.

  "I have no idea. Just keep your eyes peeled and get ready to call targets for your heavy armour."

  "Don't tell me how to command my Unit."

  "I won't tell you how to do your job if you stop asking me stupid questions and start using your scanning teams," Major Cumberland griped back.

  "Sergeant! I'll have you-"

  "Shut it!" He shot back as a power source appeared on his reticule only fifty meters away. It was one of the power suits several of the light infantry that had just arrived with the Colonel were hiding behind. "Get your people away from that loader suit!"

  It was too late. The three meter tall machine snatched an empty ammunition cartridge the size of a coffin and swung it with impossible speed at the four infantrymen using him as cover, striking three hard enough to dislodge them from the deck. They were flung across the span at great speed while the armoured suit pounded its other claw hand into the fourth infantryman's chest so brutally that he flat lined the second he was struck.

  "Fire! Open fire!" Colonel Ratner ordered.

  It was too late. The thing had some kind of impact shielding that easily deflected their small arms fire. Even the heavy suits barely dented its thick armour.

  "Those things are made to survive ship to ship guns! We'll never penetrate without explosives. Use 'em or lose 'em!" Major Cumberland ordered. One of his men tossed his last grenade set to a manual trigger and blew it as it came into contact with the chest plate of the armoured suit. To everyone's surprise and dismay it barely scratched it. "Don't let that thing get to you!" Cumberland warned as he carefully fired at the round sensor cap atop its shoulders. If the pilot inside noticed, he didn’t let on.

  "Should we fire rockets, Colonel?" asked one of the heavy armour units.

  The loading suit snatched one of the heavily armoured soldiers who wasn't wary or fast enough to keep away and hurled him at the rest of his unit. They were still too tightly grouped to use their weapons or to keep from getting hit by whatever the armoured suit decided to toss.

  "Fire everything! Bring it down! Bring it down!" Colonel Ratner shouted as he fell back behind the armoured units for cover.

  Major Cumberland had other ideas. He turned and ran for the express elevator.

  "Get your ass back here Major!" shouted Ratner, furious.

  He let his boots lose traction on the deck so he could drift at speed towards the elevator. When he hit the back of the large cargo car he re-affixed them and turned towards a wide eyed soldier just outside the lift who was breathing so hard he was fogging up his visor. “I need you and your hand scanner, get in here,” Cumberland ordered, gripping the collar of his breast plate and drawing him inside.

  The soldier didn’t have to be told twice, and moved as quickly as his boots would allow, handing his scanner over on the way. In a few key strokes Cumberland adjusted the focus and began inspecting the deck behind the railgun loader suit who was charging the heavy armour. The first line of the unit fired their rockets, four of them missed, exploding against the upper hull. The other two were right on target.

  The loader suit took damage and hesitated, faltering with a backwards step. It rocked forward onto its right foot and broke into a dead run, closing the distance between it and the heavily armoured soldiers at an alarming rate. The second line fired their rockets, and by the time three of them impacted, the loader suit was so close that the heavy armoured units took peripheral heat damage.

  The suit was in their midst then. It picked up a heavily armoured soldier in each hand and used them as cudgels, breaking both men and armour. When the improvised cudgels missed the scattering heavily armoured soldiers, the loader suit slammed the soldiers in its grip against the solid deck, cracking protective plating wide open. A burst of air told everyone who witnessed it that the man inside would die of exposure in seconds if he hadn’t already been crushed.

  The several swings connected with the nearby armoured units, knocking them all off balance. Then one of them fired a rocket, missing the loader suit and striking one of the heavy armoured units dead on.

  As Colonel Ratner shouted, "Cease fire! Cease fire!" and ran in the other direction, reinforcements began drifting between the battlecruiser above and entering through the many apertures that had opened to decompress the massive compartment.

  Major Cumberland's heart sank as his scanner picked up openings in the deck. Bursts of air escaping from the dozens of deck storage and access compartments were the first warning. The second warning was the size of most of the compartments. "Colonel! We're standing on the storage compartments for those loader suits! There are more coming!"

  "We have reinforcements en-route, Major. This'll be over in no time."

  Major Cumberland swept the scanner from left to right and counted as quickly as he could while reading the results. With great ease and agility thirty loaders suits came up from their storage compartments along with four other three and a half meter tall suits he recognized immediately.

  He targeted one of the brown and black camouflaged suits again and ran a concentrated scan. He broke into a cold sweat the moment it completed. "Colonel! They have Sol Defence Advanced Encounter suits! Order the Battlecruiser to fire directly on the four targets I'm marking!"

  "Negative, Major! Our orders are to take this ship in one piece! I'm not going to call in a strike at point blank!"

  The Advanced Encounter suit. It was something he'd seen in a movie called Breaking the Belt when he was a boy about the last time a government tried to make a claim on the outer edge of the Sol solar system. According to the film the Sol Defence Fleet believed in countering an attack with force that outweighed the offense by multiples in the hundreds. In that instance the Sol Fleet led the counter strike with Uriel fighters just like the ones he saw launch when they were about to take the Triton. In the movie, the fighters loaded with two of those Encounter Suits each. They dropped them on the hulls of destroyers, of carriers, of the munitions and supply ships and they tore into their hulls like savages. When they were finished with the hulls, they clawed and burned their way into their ships. There was no mercy, no hesitation, and no humanity. They were shock troops with more firepower per man than anyone had ever seen, and more armour.

  When he saw one in a museum as a boy, it looked like a brown and black demon. Its thin, hard black hands were like talons, ready to rip anything in its way apart. The
pulse guns on its arms were the same size as some he'd seen in the space flight museum, on full blown starfighters. He recalled the statistics on the machine. Able to heft seven thousand tons, with armour that could withstand a one thousand kilometre orbit with a standard yellow star, armed with a high powered particle beam cannon on one arm and an energizing shard cannon on the other. It was fuelled by a pair of shielded cold micro fusion generators, had an energy shield and focused fusion ion propulsion. He remembered looking up at the captured relic in the Soner Museum as a boy and how small he felt.

  That feeling, along with a deep fear threatened to completely unman him as he watched the four machines stand tall and begin a long charge up the deck from the rear. The four he was seeing looked more advanced, newer, slimmer, and far more dangerous. "I need my unit to fall back to the cargo lift. We're going to survive this."

  "Major! I'll have your commission for this!"

  "I'll defect before I put my men into combat against this bunch! This fight is already theirs."

  The four Encounter suits opened fire with their particle shard weapons first, and what he saw in that old movie paled in comparison to what they did to the soldiers in reality. Thin shards of slow moving, excited particles moved across the broad deck and sliced through the Colonel’s heavily armoured units as though they were wearing tissue paper.

  Major Cumberland waited for his retreating soldiers impatiently; "Move! Move! Move!" he shouted, though he didn't have to. Several of the Colonel’s men followed; a few of them in heavy armour. Those were the ones who would be left behind; there was no way Cumberland would hold the lift long enough for their slow bulks.

  The Encounter suits stopped firing at the soldiers on the deck and turned their attention to the Battlecruiser above. The loader suits charged. They were so agile, so quick; it was like watching several lines of runners break from the starting line. Behind them rose one hundred fifty or more men and women with personal shields and heavy particle rifles. They all fired on full automatic, lighting the deck with tens of thousands of rounds. Half of Colonel Ratner's forces were gunned down in seconds. Major Cumberland saw the last of his men steps away from the lift car and hit the close button. "Command, I’m in retreat with some of the Colonel’s men. Deck twenty one is a complete loss and you have heavy armour mounting a counter incursion on your vessel. Please acknowledge."

  "Acknowledged. Do you have any chance of preventing the incursion?”

  “I could try harsh language.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Not a chance in hell. What about Ratner? Doesn’t he have access to anything heavier?”

  “The Colonel is dead, Major," came the reply. They had gotten away, but Major Cumberland was left with a difficult choice and a dozen men and women whose morale was nearly shattered.

  "Major Cumberland. This is Command." It was a different voice that time, one he’d never heard before.

  "I'm receiving you."

  "Can you verify what we're seeing? It looks like all our people were just gunned down on the upper deck during a comms blackout."

  "That's the correct assessment. They have Sol Defence Encounter Armour. You should pick them up on Battlecruiser 1109's hull any second now."

  "What?"

  "Look for cutters. There's a counter incursion going on right now. I was just telling your subordinate the same thing."

  "Your new orders are to proceed to the command deck to assist. Fighting has broken out on the bridge."

  "Yes sir. I thought they’d already taken the bridge, sir."

  “That’s need to know only, Major.”

  “Bullshit, you’re going to tell me what we’re getting into, now.”

  “They let us take the bridge twice, both times were a trap. We’re taking it for good.”

  “Acknowledged. Keep me in the loop Command, this operation is too out of joint for this need to know crap.”

  “Secure that attitude and get on mission. Command out.”

  Major Cumberland hesitated a moment before changing the express car's heading. It felt like his stomach had flipped upside down, he hadn't been so nervous, so gun shy since he picked up a rifle for the first time on the range.

  "Where are we headed Major?" Asked one of his men from behind, he was still catching his breath.

  Cumberland selected the command deck on the control panel. "The bridge. We're going to wrap this up before it gets any worse."

  Chapter 23

  Miscellaneous Metropolis Mechanica

  "It's a shanty port," said the cab driver as he banked around a tall docking pad. Beneath were several other, disused pads fanning out around a central pillar down its full length. Landing on one of the middle platforms would be a nightmare, and Ayan didn't trust the looks of them at all, or the other pilots.

  She couldn't help but look over the grizzled nafalli's shoulder as he piloted the beaten people carrier in a round about way over hundreds of landed ships and towers dedicated to nothing more than housing vessels. The cab was originally built to pilot itself, but someone had come along and torn out the main computer systems, replacing them with crude pilot's controls and computer displays. The navnet was projected by a flickering hologram that used a thin mist as a medium, creating a humid environment in the cabin. The mess of small people carriers and ships of all sizes made for a pilot's worst nightmare. The computer was constantly suggesting new paths to the pilot, who seemed to be flying as much by instinct and eye as he was by the navnet's suggestions.

  "Why do they call it a shanty port?" Asked Laura, her voice so high pitched it was near a squeak. She was watching the surrounding streams of air cars and small ships as they wove between them. A sight Ayan was trying not to concentrate on.

  "Look down there, see that strip of buildings right in the middle of the slips? That's why. People build up cities, sometimes right proper buildings, and make whatever they can trading with the ships nearby. Whole other jungle down there, like a city where maybe a handful of people stick around. Gangs too, most of 'em smugglers and privateers. Hard bunch."

  "What's that?" Jenny asked, pointing at a number of slips that had been walled off like a compound. There was a hangar in the centre, all around it were ships roughly the size of the Samson.

  "Oram's place. Keeps his whole place buttoned down tight, uses his own people for security. One of the best privateers out here. He's so big that he hires other ships for some of his hops."

  "Ah, so he takes on big targets."

  "Yup, has a destroyer all his own in orbit too."

  "Who does he go after?"

  "Don't know, none of my business. What are you folk going here for anyhow? Looks like you're a well sorted bunch, dressed like space station sort, don't know why you need to talk to anyone at this end."

  "We're buying food, supplies and a place to land."

  "Oh, stepping around the Visa scam, eh? Good lass. I'm guessin' Greydock wouldn't take you in?"

  "How did you know?”

  “Greydock doesn't take anyone without a visa unless you're one of their special guests. Where're your ships now?”

  “They had us set down in the Dower Wastes.”

  "Hope your crew isn't out there too."

  "They are."

  "Normally, I'd say you should take a slip for any price and put your ear to the ground. Find someone you don't mind doing business with then move your ships in. But since you're stuck in the Dower Wastes, I'd say you'll have to settle for the first slips you can afford. Don't try to go around the landlords, neither. Good way to get slagged."

  "How does it work down there? I mean, the Port Authority is gone, so who settles disputes over landing sites?" Asked Laura.

  "Lady, if I had time and you were paying well enough, I could find a dispute being settled right now. Every slice of this land comes at a price. Carthans set the outer boundaries to the port, and they blast anything that tries to land outside of it from space, but they don't care what happens inside.”

  “So they fight
for their territory.”

  “All the time. Happens in the lower city by the wall too, but that’s a quieter kind of fight, more room-to-room, bad to get caught in. Ever since the AI’s were erased and the Confederation pulled out, crews fight for scraps of land, food, guns, whatever you can name. Best place to be is near the top of the food chain, or near enough to it.”

  “Top of the food chain?” asked Jenny, looking a little green.

  “Start purifying water, bringing in food, guns if you can get away with it, but you didn’t hear the last bit from me. Carthans don’t like gun runners, they take a bite from the only market they can corner. The established types know best. They call themselves Port Masters, say they have legal claim, but really, they were here longer, got to establish relations with each other and most importantly, they have the people and guns to make their boarders strong. If you can get in with one of them, it might be best, but you make all their enemies your own when you do.”

  “So they're crime bosses?”

  “You see law enforcement since you got here?” Asked the nafalli pilot with a chuckle. “They're the Governors.”

  “There have got to be other ports on the moon.”

  “Sure, but they're all the same except for Greydock. Carthans can't afford to rebuild or run them properly, and the Confederation would love to see this solar system destroy itself now that they’re being forced out. A lot of people miss the UCWC, but they're not coming back. I can’t stand listening to people belly ache about things they can’t change, the Confeds leaving qualifies right up there with the colour of the sky and the price of water. The way I see it; if Tamber is where you are, it’s either because you can’t find your way off or you’re riding an advantage that makes it worth your while.”

  Ayan looked across the endless sea of ships and saw nothing familiar. Amongst the freighters, small haulers, luxury vessels and the myriad of cross classification ships there was nothing she'd ever seen before. "These people have ships, they could leave if they liked. Why don't they just move to another solar system if it's so dangerous?"