Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  “Do we have torpedo control?”

  “Port racks still functional. Starboard are damaged. Maybe if we could get a team in there,” Jones replied.

  Chatter from the communications line to the Saratoga as they prepped their launchers.

  The display turned white and a massive blob appeared between the two ships. Captain Garland felt the ship begin to turn as the gravitational force sucked them towards it.

  “The alien ship has displaced between us and the Saratoga!”

  “Gunnery, point everything we’ve got at that thing! Fire all available torpedoes,” the XO hollered. “Helm, get our orientation under control.”

  “The Saratoga’s launching fighters,” Haim said as a stream of green dots flew out of the carrier.

  Ringing metal resonated through the hull as the torpedoes flew from the tubes. The crew scrambled to comply as another explosion rocked the ship outside the C&C. The display spun and Garland watched more of the pyramidal attack ships jump off the surface of the alien star to join the battle. An aperture appeared on the face of the spherical ship and a wave of super-heated gas stolen from the Jovian planet washed out over the surface of the Saratoga, exploding the tiny ships, both friend and foe. An electrical shock rang out through space, sensors and comms going down. The ship suddenly became quiet after the pulse of energy radiated through space.

  “Get us back online!” the Captain yelled. He could hear thumping outside in the hallway. The marines were holding off the intruders, but for how much longer, he couldn’t say. A junior tech in ops floated up out of his seat. They’d lost gravity too.

  The Captain became aware of the sound of his breathing inside his helmet and he calmed his nerves. He lifted his sidearm and turned to face the door, using the back of his seat for cover.

  ***

  Master Sergeant Jim Quale and his remaining marines crouched along the walls of the hallway in front of the entrance to the C&C. A bright light was ripping through the last remaining pair of blast doors that would lead the intruders to the ship’s command center.

  “Ammo check?” Quale asked, looking at the readout on his MAR89.

  “Almost out. Half a mag,” Lance Corporal Clarmont reported.

  “Fifty rounds in my AR56.” Private Nairn was shaking.

  “One mag left. Two ‘nades. Sidearms?” Quale asked, watching the cutter round the halfway mark around the door.

  “Mine’s still full.” Clarmont.

  Jones fumbled for his in his holster. He checked the slide before putting it back on his hip. “Full. I don’t think those’ll get through their armor.”

  “Aim for the faceplates,” Quale said. “All right, positions. Nairn, back here by the door. Clarmont, you and I flank forward. We go high. Oorah!” He clapped Jones on the helmet before kicking off and planting himself on the ceiling, right of the entrance.

  “Rah!” Clarmont followed him in, boots locking him into the ceiling beside him.

  “When that door opens, I’m pitching a grenade in behind ‘em. It should push them forward and then we hit ‘em.”

  Nairn was watching from behind a panel he pulled out of the wall as a makeshift cover, the end of his gun shaking.

  “Steady, Nairn.”

  The cutter reached the end of the door and it flew into the cramped hallway. In one smooth motion, Quale pumped a grenade out of his launcher into the hallway, lobbing it straight over the invaders’ heads behind them. One of the enormous aliens started to turn around to see what it was when the grenade detonated. The partial air in this section was enough to create a shockwave. As predicted, it propelled the lead two aliens forward into the hallway, and Quale and Clarmont fired bursts of bullets into their heads from close range, rupturing the thick spherical helmets in a rain of burning metal.

  Nairn opened up, ripping semi-controlled bursts into the aliens flying through the door towards him. One of them survived the explosion and raised his cannon at Nairn just as his AR56 clicked empty. He threw the gun away and drew his sidearm as the alien barreled down on him. All three meters and nearly half a ton opened fire with its plasma cannon, spraying Private Nairn all over the back wall of the hallway.

  Clarmont yelled a wordless howl as he held down his trigger, emptying his gun into the back of the invading alien. He hit something on its pack and the alien exploded in a blast of fire that knocked the wind out of Clarmont and Quale and showered them both with molten shrapnel.

  ***

  The lights flickered on in the C&C just as another explosion ripped through the hallway outside. “Displays! Sensors! Get us back online,” the Captain barked, still aiming his pistol at the door.

  “Aye, sir,” Haim replied, rebooting her sensor pod.

  The XO spoke into the radio, voice strangely calm. “All remaining marines to the C&C immediately. Gunnery techs and all personnel. Repel those boarders.”

  “Looks like the Saratoga’s powering up her main gun,” Haim said as the holodisplay flickered to life again, partially obscured by smoke.

  “Zoom us in,” the Captain commanded. She did, the green blob of the flagship glowing on screen in front of the massive, planetoid-sized alien mothership.

  A flash obliterated their view just as an explosion in the outside hallway sent something flying into the hatch with a bang.

  The smoke cleared and the view resolved. The alien ship remained in place and intact, unchanged from the impact of the flagship’s main cannon.

  Turk said, “Radio’s coming back online. Transmission from Saratoga. Audio only.”

  “Put ‘em on.”

  “That’s it, then. We thought we’d lost you, Hap,” the admiral said.

  “Take more than a rogue star and these damned triangles to take us down. How are you holding up?”

  “Our armor’s been blasted away. We have ships punching through our hull at two, four, and midnight. That mothership is just hanging there, spewing those little fighters at us.”

  Captain Garland nodded, half watching the door to the hallway. A red blotch appeared in the upper right corner and steadily brightened through orange to bright white. Sparks flew out and smoke filled the command center. “I think we’re just about done here.”

  “Us too, old friend.” A pause, a flurry of noise on the other end. “Do you still have engine control?”

  The Captain looked over at his XO, now moving to the helm; one of the twins, Pollux, slumped forward in his seat. Turk nodded curtly. “Aye. Somewhat.”

  “You are not to let them take your ship. Do you understand?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “It has been an honor serving with you, Hap.”

  “The honor is all mine.”

  The XO interrupted, “Captain! The ship…”

  The display brightened and a swarm of vessels on the surface of the enemy star swirled in a circular spiral. A bright spot appeared inside the aperture that swelled to a blinding light. The beam of focused matter lashed out and enveloped the Saratoga in a blaze of plasma that continued on through space into the inner system. It only lasted a second. When the light faded, the Saratoga was gone. The star had dimmed. The remaining green dots of the Fifteenth floated around a gaping hole in space.

  The room began to spin.

  The Captain turned away from the holodisplay to see the bright light finish cutting their hatch from its coaming, and it fell to the deck. Jones stood up and turned, jumping through the low gravity across the breach. Beyond him, one of the big aliens fired into the bridge, Jones catching most of the spray from its gun. Incoherent yelling and gunfire clouded his senses. The Captain crouched low and fired into the bubbled face mask of the intruder and it fell back.

  More yelling. More gunfire, as the displays jumped and a wave of fire washed through the Jovian system. The Captain felt a deep rumble and the ship tilted and rolled around them as the displays flickered and winked out again. The firing stopped and the emergency lighting came on in the smoke-filled room.

  Silence. Loss of
gravity.

  “What just happened? Report!” the Captain asked as their suits negotiated local communications.

  The XO answered, voice distorting and bending on the tenuous link. “Saw some kind of EM burst before everything went out. I could have sworn it was coming from in-system.” Infrared lasers danced around the room as their suits set up a local light network.

  “Something of ours?” Garland asked.

  The XO shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir.”

  For the second time in ten minutes, Chief Haim rebooted her sensor consoles. She left the panel open this time. “We’re coming back up, sir. Holy mother… Look at this.”

  She transferred the displays back to the main holodisplay, which flickered to life in the smoky haze. A view of local space appeared. Enemy ships tumbling without power. Jupiter enveloped in a wash of coruscating color as the solar flare ripped through the gas giant’s magnetosphere. “Everything’s been knocked out.”

  The Captain hauled himself over to the door and peered outside.

  Sergeant Quale stuck his head in, one booted foot on the back of the fallen alien. “Sorry this one got past me, sir.”

  “You’re making a habit of that today.” The Captain holstered his gun and clapped Quale’s armored shoulder.

  “I don’t think they’re going to be a problem.” Quale gestured down the hallway at two of the invaders. The bear-sized aliens floated forward and pushed their guns behind them into the empty corridor, power conduits disconnected from their suits. They held out their enormous arms in front of them, three fingered hands spread open.

  Quale said, “I think they’re surrendering, sir.”

  “Well, make sure of it. See if you can get them into the brig.”

  He turned back into the C&C as jets of halon put out fires around tactical and ops. “Turk, get our systems back online. Sensors, report.”

  Haim said, “I… I’m trying to make sense of this. I think it was a solar flare? Nothing like I’ve ever seen.”

  A cloud floated in the center of the display where the alien mothership had been before. The view from their remaining sensor drone showed a glowing nebula being scattered on the solar wind. Long traceries of energized gas sparked and crackled as it flowed through the Jovian magnetosphere.

  The XO clapped his captain on the shoulder and his voice rang in his helmet. “Captain, would you look at that. The triangle ships are all floating away. Their power’s been knocked out.”

  “What caused it?” he asked as hundreds of new displacements started warping in all around them.

  “It’s the Twenty-third, sir!” The XO was laughing now. A cheer went up around the room. “He did it! That crazy old Russian did it!”

  “Did someone order the cavalry?” The voice reverberated in their helmets as the face of Blue Squadron leader appeared on the display.

  “It’s Carter-Fucking-Hayes, sir!” The XO beamed.

  The Captain breathed a sigh of relief as the fighters began mopping up the stragglers. “I’d recognize Commander Carter Hayes’ face anywhere.” The cavalry surrounded and blew away any ships that powered up and tried to run. Reports started coming in from around the ship, and from the remaining vessels in the fleet, that the aliens were surrendering. The displays onscreen showed the remnants of the alien mothership drifting apart, no longer held together by whatever force had created it, gases dispersing across thousands of kilometers of space.

  “Set course to rejoin the Fifteenth. We’ll want to regroup and dispatch rescue teams to Ganymede in case there are any survivors.” The Captain feared the worst, but they had to try. “The Saratoga’s gone,” he said quietly as he watched the buzzing fighters on the holodisplay.

  A pang of jealousy tickled the Captain’s hind brain as he watched the strike fighters dodge and weave through the fields of inert vessels and debris. It took him back to his days as a combat fighter pilot in the USASF. One of the alien pyramid ships woke up and started firing a spray of plasma towards Colonel Hayes’ ship before he lit it up with his main guns, a huge smile across his helmeted face as he blew the small alien fighter back to hell.

  “His moustache is bullet proof.”

  Robert M. Campbell Biography

  Robert M. Campbell hails from the east coast of Canada, having recently returned to New Brunswick after extended stays in Toronto and Ottawa. An early love of astronomy and technology eventually led him to a career in software engineering. Robert studied Computer Science and Anthropology at Acadia University in Nova Scotia.

  After twenty years working in the aerospace, government and open source software sectors, he has written his first science fiction novels, Trajectory Book 1 and Book 2 – the first instalments of a projected six in the New Providence Series. Seedfall: New Providence Series Book 3 is out now.

  Robert and his wife Deb live on their small hobby farm on the river where they focus on writing and art. They hope to fill it with dogs in the near future. At least two.

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  Field of Fire

  By Ralph Kern

  Just with my naked eyes, I could see the Sun was sick, her disc a diseased orange mottle. Even from such huge distances as we were at, visible bulges erupted and burst, causing wispy arcs of plasma to loop from her boiling surface.

  “Confirm again, you’re not running this through any processing or filtering software?” I asked.

  "Skipper.” Exasperation matched the confusion in Tyler Rhodes’ voice. The pilot was puzzled, as he damn well should be on seeing his young vibrant home sun looking haggard and old. “It’s only going through the standard suite so we can actually resolve images through our displacement sphere.”

  I leaned forward in my seat, resting an elbow on the console before me and balancing my chin on a fist as I contemplated what we were looking at. There could be no mechanism for this to happen, surely?

  What I did know was that whatever this meant, it wasn’t good. Our sun was dying a premature death, aging far sooner than she should. Billions of years sooner. It looked like she was coming towards the red dwarf stage of her life cycle.

  I shook my head. We had far more immediate problems than this. Ranger was on final approach to Sol, and the only way we could slow down from displacement drive was to be captured in a gravity well. I looked over at Beatrice ‘Rice’ Smith. “Tell me what this means for slotting into the pocket.”

  She held her hands up helplessly in response. We were on unprecedented ground here, and Ranger’s scientists were still in cryogenic sleep, following crossing of the void from our latest voyage to explore the stars. “Instinctively, I would say it’s got to screw with it. But…”

  “But?”

  “But we don’t have any choice. We have to go in.”

  Yeah. The only other option was too frightening to contemplate, but I’d be no captain if I didn’t at least explore our choices, as unthinkable as they might be. “Okay. Let’s assume we bypass Sol. What’s the next viable pocket for us to drop into on this vector?”

  Tyler turned back to me, and raised an eyebrow. “Skipper, we’re going into Sol, or the next stop’s gonna be Draco Dwarf. We just ain’t going to be passing any other stars close enough to fall into their pocket.”

  “Draco Dwarf as in…?”

  “As in the dwarf galaxy, Brad,” Rice responded quietly. “A quarter of a million light years out.”

  Leaning back in my seat, I let out a sigh. Once activated, our displacement drive would carry us in a straight line until a deep enough gravity well caught us. We were either going in here, or it’d be a long wait until we hit the next one. I could’ve accepted the numbers if it was a hundred light years out. That would have added half a century to our return journey, assuming there was a Sol to return to. But one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies? That just wasn’t going to happen.

  No, we were going in. And that was that.

  The only other option was a certain but lingering dea
th as we sailed for millennia in the dark of intergalactic space.

  I focused on the main display, watching the box icons sweeping out from Sol every 15 seconds, each denoting we had travelled a light minute.

  We were going to find out what was happening to Sol soon enough.

  ***

  Ranger crashed out of displacement amid a shower of twinkling, dissipating exotic particles and surged away from the Earth gravitational anchor. The ship vibrated and groaned far more than she ordinarily did from a transition.

  I glanced at my holo-displays. Thank God, no red flags. The Earth anchor had done its job, grasping us out of displacement.

  “Holy shit,” Tyler breathed, capturing my attention. Thoughts of what was happening with Sol fled my mind I looked on in awed shock.

  The holo-display rapidly populated as the ship’s sensors hungrily absorbed the incoming information. Looking out of the bridge windows gave just as much of a clue as to what was going on; it was happening so close, I could see it with my naked eye.

  One hell of a battle was raging.

  The roiling subdued glow of our diseased sun shone hazy orange beams across space. The photons ricocheted off spilled gas, debris, and bodies so dense it was as if we were flying through a red mist. Dozens, no, hundreds of ships clashed in low orbit, hanging over an Earth rendered flat by how close we were. Fire and light blossomed from explosions. Missiles lanced between vessels and shoals of fighters danced furiously.

  A massive asteroid hauler tumbled dead ahead on the fringes of the battle, disgorging atmosphere from gaping wounds in her flanks. Her broken back trembled with internal explosions as a strange ship continued lashing the metal corpse with fire.

  And our residual velocity coming out of displacement had put us on a collision course for the battered hulk.

  “Tyler?” I called loudly to my pilot. He seemed stunned by what he was seeing. So was I. Already the vista pushed out the worry about whatever was happening with Sol.