Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  ***

  “Captain! Possible hull breach forward section, deck one,” Jones yelled, an edge of panic in his voice.

  “Seal deck one. Send a marine team to escort some engineers up there. Deploy damage control.” The Captain held onto the arm of his chair, watching the virtual displays in the center of the room and the augmented displays in his ocular implants. More of the small, pyramidal ships were popping in and out of nearby space, preventing a solid lock by their guns. Worse, they were running low on ammunition.

  “Sir, battery one just went down. I think it was damaged in the impact.”

  “Get a gunnery team down there.” His personal display in his right ocular showed something sticking out of the front of his ship just before the forward sensor drone got blown apart, the image blanking. One of the alien ships was wedged into the hull, fused in place. He considered firing a torpedo in an attempt to dislodge it, but discarded that as a very bad idea.

  Haim in sensors turned to the XO. “Commander, the alien mothership has already reached the Fifteenth. It’s over Ganymede.”

  All eyes turned to the holodisplay and saw the new moon burning high above Ganymede like a tiny star, its surface undulating with the tessellated mass of tiny pyramidal ships.

  “Well, we can’t jump now with that ship sticking out of our hull.” Turkel turned to ops and yelled, “Get that thing off our ship!”

  Two junior spacers leapt up and ran for the exit just as the hatch opened, and a man fell forward into the room, dressed in orange, a marine in tow. Haim in sensors let out a gasp of surprise, and shielded her eyes from the intruding swatch of light.

  Sergeant Quale held his sidearm out, aimed at the intruder. “Sorry, sir, he said he had important news. I offered to shoot him but he wouldn’t listen.”

  “Captain,” Yuri began as he regained his feet and isolated Captain Garland in the dim light of the bridge, his eyes drawn to the big holodisplay in the middle of the room showing Jupiter and its moons, a host of green, blue and red dots screaming through space. A big blazing ball arced towards the loosely clustered green dots representing the Fifteenth battle group. “I believe I understand why our displacement drives are not working properly, but I need to analyze your ship’s data to be sure.”

  Another rumble almost knocked the man off his feet and a siren blared. Sparks flew from the navigation cluster, sending a woman reeling backwards, arms raised.

  “We’re being boarded, sir,” ops reported. “Should we send additional marines?”

  Captain Garland barely contained his frustration and considered going down there himself. “Send all of them, goddamnit!”

  Yuri grabbed the arm of the captain’s chair for stability and Garland considered putting his knife through his throat. “Please, sir. I can get to Earth if I’m right. We may be able to get help.”

  The navigation officer got out of her seat and stepped forward, the deck-plating causing her to sway uneasily in the uneven gravity. “I have to get to the computer room. Console’s fried here. I should be able to lay in a course from down there.”

  “Helm, how long until we can jump?” Captain Garland asked.

  The twins looked at each other and the one on the left, Castor, lifted his helmet and turned to speak. Alone, he said, “Engines are back up and spooled, but we don’t have an anchor point. Navs are down and I can’t jump without a solution. And we have a damned alien ship stuck out of our nose, so…” They both shrugged together.

  “Burn for the fleet, maximum cruise. Bickers, take this man with you. Give him what he wants.”

  “Yessir.” Bickers grabbed Yuri’s arm and dragged him with her, Sergeant Quale in tow.

  ***

  The ship lurched and Master Sergeant Jim Quale extended a hand to brace himself against the wall. He could hear yelling ahead and booted feet all around from his suit’s enhanced hearing.

  Harsh staccato metallic reports echoed through the tight gangways, not far away now.

  “Is that gunfire?” the older man asked.

  The navs specialist kept hauling him forward to their destination, her face stern with determination.

  A slew of yelling erupted on his headset’s channel: “We need assistance. All able bodies to upper deck, forward section, torpedo bay.”

  The Sergeant lowered his helmet’s visor and his mask slid into place from the sides to cover his lower face, locking him in a tight grip. The Nav specialist turned as she heard his armor closing up. Her pretty face wore an expression of concern and confusion.

  “You’ll be all right. Stay with him. I’m needed forward,” he said to her, voice relayed through the speaker in his chest.

  He didn’t wait for her to acknowledge him. His brothers and sisters needed him in the forward section immediately. He turned and boosted down the hallway, suit thrusters pushing him like a cannonball through the tight passage.

  He slowed his flight when he reached the ladder and jumped up to the next deck, deflecting his angle as he sped through the hatch and kicked off the wall, caroming forward again. Thrusters fired in all directions to keep him steady. He reached the forward section in short order, the blast doors sealed shut.

  He placed a hand on the doors and felt the echoes of gunfire on the other side as rounds ricocheted off the walls.

  Quale checked the hallway, making sure it was devoid of personnel, and barked an order into his mic. “Ship, close this section around me now, open these blast doors when you have a seal. Execute.”

  The ship’s automation systems verified his authority, then checked that there was no one in the hallway around him, then finally acknowledged him with a beep. In a fraction of a second, the hallway sealed itself off and the blast doors forward cranked open, sucking the air out around him. His magnetic boots latched him onto the deck plating, his armor suit locking its joints, preventing him from falling forward and injuring himself. A rush of drugs and adrenaline flooded his system, prepping his mind and body for combat.

  Without thinking, Quale had his MAR89 combination assault rifle ready in his hands as the air rushed out around him. He followed the direction of the air with electronically enhanced eyes: droplets of blood traveled through the hallway and seeped out around chunks of collapsed bulkhead in low-gee slow motion. The alien ship’s blunt corner had punched through and opened up like the spikes of a grappling hook, locking itself into the hallway beyond. Two marines, faces obscured by their armored face masks, sheltered behind containers, looked at him through the newly opened door, eyes a mix of surprise and fear. Men and women were floating in the breached hallway, amid the thick droplets of blood and chunks of meat.

  Three monstrous shapes stood in the torpedo room by the nose of their ship, one on each sidewall and one closer on the floor, like three chunky vertices of a pyramid. They raised their guns, the size of mortar launchers, and aimed at him. For a fleeting second, through the drug and adrenaline-induced slowness of time, Jim thought to himself that they looked like grizzly bears in heavily-armored space suits, like something from a futuristic circus act. The enormous weapons attached to the canisters on their backs ruined the whimsical illusion and wiped the smile off his face.

  No time to think about it. Jim fired into the room, doing his best to keep his gun pointed low, beneath the floating injured or dead marines in his way. Controlled bursts of fire as he pulsed the trigger and boosted sideways around the edge of the door, bullets vectoring up and around the bodies, tracking the targets in his HUD. A blast of blue-green plasma fire ripped past him into the hallway and one of the bodies sailed by over his head, suit scorched and melted.

  More gunfire ripped through the hallway, sounding thin in the evacuating air.

  “What the hell are those things?” Jim yelled into his mic, angling his gun around the opening of the blast doors. He looked through the gun’s sights relayed to his helmet optics and saw the closest marine scurrying around the edge of the door beside him, firing his AG56 behind him on full auto.

  “They
’re aliens, Sarge!”

  Jim pulsed his trigger at the invaders as the other man on the opposite side of the door tried to get around to cover. Jim’s bullets bounced off the hulking thing, casting trails of sparks as the beast spewed a stream of projectiles from a side-mounted barrel on its main gun, shredding the man in front of them into mist and shrapnel.

  Jim increased the magnification on his relayed gunsights and concentrated on the aliens before he had to pull his gun back around the corner to prevent it from getting melted in the maelstrom. “They’re big.”

  “Almost three meters.”

  “We need to hold them in there. Can you do that for me, marine?”

  “Oorah.”

  “Rah,” Jim agreed as he flicked the safety off his grenade launcher. “Fire in the hole.” He stuck the gun around the corner once more and pumped a grenade in as he jumped off the wall, jump jets propelling him across the breach to the other side of the hallway. The grenade sailed in slow motion into the middle of the three bulky alien shapes, detonating in a bright flash of light that sent shrapnel spikes out around it in all directions.

  The aliens recoiled, one of them crumpling in its suit, a puncture leaking air in a thin jet, before it reared up on its legs and jumped towards the opened blast doors.

  “Ship! Seal these blast doors! Execute!”

  Jim and his lone marine survivor aimed their guns around the doors as they slid closed, holding the triggers down and emptying their magazines before the doors slammed shut. They felt the crash of the alien intruder against the doors as they closed.

  ***

  “It sounds like the ship is going to come apart,” Yuri said to the navigation officer working at the computers.

  Technical Specialist Heather Bickers tried ignoring him as she transferred her nav solution to the bridge. “Coordinates sent,” she said into her throat mic.

  “Wait, let me see those.” Yuri was reaching around her, trying to get at the screens through the tangle of cabling hanging over the console.

  Bickers pulled her sidearm out of her holster and pointed it at him as she spoke into her mic. “Helm, belay last. Standby.”

  She looked at him with green eyes that flickered back and forth between his, listening intently on her ear piece.

  Yuri raised his hands and leaned around her, looking at the navigational computer. “And these were your last jumps? Intended position and ultimate destination, yes?” He indicated the readout in the corner.

  She nodded at him, lowering her gun. “You see these offsets? Imagine if Jupiter were instead here.” He tapped the screen, millions of kilometers away from their position.

  “But… how is that?”

  “They are disrupting the skein of Sol system. Skein is like… rope, with knots in it,” he tried to explain, but the ship’s navigator cut him off impatiently.

  “I know that. You don’t get to be a navigator without astrophysics and displacement theory.”

  Yuri continued, bunching his hands in front of them. “The rope is fraying. They are cutting it up somehow, making some jumps impossible. Seems to be gravitational phenomenon at work, but jumps are showing where it is.” He spun the display out and tapped at a region of space between the Earth and Mars. “Something here, yes?”

  Bickers shrugged. “I need to send a solution to helms.”

  “Here,” Yuri zoomed the display back in. “Fleet is here. You need to jump… here.” He tapped in the coordinates and a new set of crosshairs lit up the screen.

  Bickers studied the screen for a moment then said to Yuri, “You’d better be right.”

  “I count on it. Now take me to my Sumerki.”

  She holstered her gun and stood up, hauling on his arm. “Helm, you have your coordinates. We are good to go.”

  The navigator jogged down the hall to a ladder. “You’re down there, can you find the cargo bay?”

  “Da. Spasiba, Specialist Bickers.”

  “OK. Good luck.”

  She left him then and ran back the way they’d come. Yuri felt a slight twinge in his gut as the ship displaced and everything went quiet. He made his way down the hall to the cargo bay and walked inside. There was nobody here. Nobody pointing guns at him.

  The cargo bay was in disarray; some of the containers had come loose from their moorings and slid around the room. It took him a few moments to find his helmet in behind some crates, but at least his gloves were still both inside. He put them on and closed up the seals. After that, he went to work unstrapping his ship.

  Distant thumping. The guns were firing again. They were supposed to be back in safe space. He felt a moment of panic, worrying that his theory was incorrect, but the navigational displays had confirmed it. Of course, the skein was a higher dimensional fabric, so the maths were difficult, but he’d spent the last quarter of his life familiarizing himself with the dark lace that permeated their universe. No, he was right.

  He hauled the webbing off the top of the Sumerki as another rumble threatened to knock him off his feet. The webbing snagged on one of the thruster outlets and he had to climb on top of the ship to loosen it. He attached his tether to the front of his ship by the open door and worked his way over to the bay doors. He flipped open the cover and pushed the red button.

  The doors slid open.

  The space above Ganymede was on fire. An alien pyramid ship spun past and exploded as the Morrison’s particle batteries riddled it with charged metal. The hulking mass of the Saratoga was surrounded by a whirling cloud of tiny ships, the big carrier’s guns lighting them up in a storm of explosions all around it.

  Yuri blinked, forcing himself away from the spectacle, and reeled his line in, pulling himself towards his now floating ship. “Come on, old friend. We have one more jump to make.”

  He climbed into the Sumerki’s tiny cockpit and closed the hatch, cranking the handles tight. He strapped into his seat, flipping switches on the console, powering up the ship. “Come on, come on…” The ship was drifting loose in the bay and was about to bump into a cargo pod. Another crate had lifted off the floor beside the port thruster.

  Thumbing on the radio, Yuri began transferring his new jump coordinates from his personal computer into the displacement drive’s navigation computer. “Morrison, this is Sumerki. I am leaving cargo bay. Tell guns not to shoot. Over.” When finished, he stuffed his personal computer into the pocket in his seat and gripped the controls.

  “Roger that, Sumerki. We have your transponder tagged as friendly. Godspeed.”

  To the devil, he said to himself as he turned the little spaceship in the cramped cargo hold. He didn’t have time to worry about whether or not they were being sarcastic or not. He nudged the maneuvering thrusters and his ship popped and hissed, bumping into boxes and crates as it negotiated its way out of the tiny hold. “Almost there.” He pointed the nose out the doors and boosted outside the ship. Once clear, he hit the thrusters and powered away, the displacement engine grinding to life behind him, causing the whole vessel to vibrate with its mechanical song. Yuri’s teeth chattered in his helmet.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw something triangular tumbling towards him. He let out a yell just as the particle batteries from the Morrison ripped it apart, shredding it to pieces in front of him, a large chunk barely missing him. “Bozhe moy! That was close.” A large body floated past his ship on the other side and he dodged away from it.

  He spun the ship, finally getting a good look at the Morrison as it rolled away from him, angled surfaces designed to confound radar, the big bulge in the center where the displacement drive housed its ominous power source. The big ship’s guns blazed, surrounded by tumbling wedges and buzzing sensor drones, a triangular ship sticking out of her nose like an ungainly wart. Another one of the pyramids tumbled in around the hail of bullets and connected to the intruding ship, locking into place.

  The rest of the fleet beyond were lit up by exploding shells and plasma fire, off the limb of Ganymede, massive Jupiter rolling far
below. One of the FCF ships, a two thousand ton frigate, flowered into a blaze as something critical in its drive section was opened up by a crushing impact. Ten kilometers distant, the alien ships bounced off the gnarled iron hull of the Saratoga, wearing away at the nickel armor plating in a blaze of sparks.

  Then he saw it, rising above the limb of Ganymede. A star-bright sphere surrounded by a cloud of ships. Bigger than anything in the fleet. Bigger than half the moons of Jupiter. Blazing hot casting shadows across the surface of the Jovian moon. Herschef colony glittered under the light as a vortex appeared on the whirling star’s surface and a beam of fire lanced out, bathing the surface of the moon around the industrial complex. The flare cut a scar of molten rock across the surface of Ganymede that remained burning long after the light disappeared.

  Yuri let out a yell as another ship flashed towards him. He pulled the trigger activating the ship’s displacement drive and his surroundings stretched to infinity.

  Then Sumerki was gone.

  Bullet Proof

  “My God. Herschef Colony is gone. They’re all gone!” Haim said, unable to take her eyes off the glowing slice of rock where the city used to be.

  “Incoming transmission from the Saratoga,” the XO reported from the comm station. The comms chief held a bloody rag to his head. “Putting it through.”

  A shaky, distorted image of the Admiral appeared in the holo. Ships swarmed behind him around the flagship.

  Captain Garland leaned forward. “Admiral. We have been boarded. We might not have much time.” The C&C was now in hard lockdown. The occupants on deck had all put on the rest of their suits and were ready for loss of air. The Captain’s sidearm was sitting on his lap in his gloved hand.

  “We’re taking a beating too, Hap. I’m not sure we can hold out much longer. These things are too small to hit with the big guns. Batteries are only partially effective.”

  Chief Haim zoomed the holodisplay in. “Big EM spike. Something happening on the mothership.”