by Richard Fox
He shelved the combat subroutine as Stephane put a hand on his shoulder.
“Good shootin’, Tex,” she drawled, trying to imitate an American Wild West accent.
“Not really,” he answered somberly. He watched as small secondary explosions flashed along his ship’s long, narrow trunk.
“Icky,” he said, “make sure you’re ready to move the wormhole if they launch again.”
“You got it!” Ichabod answered, waving his hand in acknowledgment, but not taking his eyes off the main holo.
Aadesh 49, Six sent through the base datanet, since when does an AI have weapons authority on my ship?
I thought it prudent to take control, Aadesh 49 replied, as I computed that, given the first missile’s armor, the second missile would strike the ship 0.3 seconds before destruction if you were the one operating the laser.
We will discuss this in detail later, Six sent.
Very well, but we have another problem. In truth, we have several.
Six heard a rapid-fire string of French profanity and brought his attention back out to the real world. Stephane was leaning on the countertop, looking at a schematic that showed red warning icons blinking along the Path’s length. There were several around the location of the FTL lifeboat.
***
The gunnery officer turned to face ProudRock Aptor.
“Both missiles have been destroyed, Currentmaster. There appears to be minor damage to the alien vessel, though it is hard to tell given the angle. Their turret is low-power, but still active.”
Aptor’s patience with the humans had reached its limit. He expected at least one of the missiles to get through. No matter, he thought.
“Gunnery, let’s see how their pitiful little weapon handles a full spread.”
Aptor felt the ship vibrate through his feet as twelve more torpedoes left the launch rails.
***
Six was rubbing his face with both hands when Matthew yelled, “Incoming!”
“Dammit, Matt! I swear to God if we make it out of this alive, I’m going to have them do a deep neuron scrub on you to make sure you never use that word ever again.”
“Another missile launch, skipper. Two, no, four, six…holy shit. Volley fire!”
Six put his head down and closed his eyes. “Icky…do your thing.”
Ichabod’s fingers had been hovering over the relevant controls since the very second Matthew announced the new attack. His tactical view showed a group of red triangles moving quickly away from the much larger red triangle representing the enemy warship. He noted their velocity and estimated the amount of time it would take to move and re-open the wormhole, selecting a point in space ahead of the missiles, and launched the initiation sequence.
The aperture folded in on itself, spiraling open directly in the missiles’ flight path less than half a second later. The speed shocked Ichabod. He thought it would be fast, but he had been ready for a delay and positioned the new aperture location to compensate for the computational lag. Now, with seconds more to spare than he had planned, he moved the terminus and angled it toward the alien ship.
***
The sensor officer aboard the egapocid warship had been looking right at the vortex when it spiraled away to nothing. He screeched in surprise and spun around.
“Currentmaster,” he yelled, “the gravitic effect! It’s gone!”
ProudRock Aptor leaned forward eagerly, opening and closing his thumbclaws. “Finally! Gunnery, target the spine of that ship and fire! Gut them like a—”
“Look there!” Wavisoc yelled, pointing at one of the peripheral wallscreens. Aptor’s head snapped first at the ship’s pessimist and then at the wallscreen he indicated. Another egapocid ship had arrived, of the very same design as the one he commanded, its shape distorted by a tightly-packed group of bright lights that looked exactly like—
—missile drives.
All six of Aptor’s eyes widened in realization.
***
The missiles penetrated the aperture and, with no detectable delay, exited through the terminus, which Ichabod Finn had opened 100 meters from the enemy warship’s hull, exactly over the section damaged when he’d first redirected their beam attack back at them.
***
The bridge rang like a gong as the flight of missiles detonated, knocking everyone to the deck. Sparks flew from overloaded circuits and the ambient lighting flickered before dying completely. As the dim emergency light strips clicked on, Aptor pushed himself up. Climbing up off his own deck had turned into an unsettling trend. He threw an arm over the side of his chair and hit the intercom for the engineering section.
“Damage report!” he screamed, mouth tentacles waving furiously.
The intercom squeaked and spat electrical pops back at him.
“Hull breech in three locations, Currentmaster, but none near critical systems. We have damage response teams working on them already.”
Aptor disconnected and looked around at his bridge crew. “None near critical systems? We should be dead. Explain!”
The gunnery officer stood to face him, head lowered, but his eyes looked directly at Aptor across the darkened bridge.
Defiance?
“I activated the self-destruct sequence, Currentmaster.”
“Without direct orders,” Aptor shouted back. The gunnery officer shrank under his commander’s furious tone. He dropped his gaze to the deck.
“I…yes, Currentmaster. Eleven of the torpedoes responded, while one appears to have malfunctioned and detonated inside the hull.”
Aptor considered having the chief engineer execute the members of his staff responsible for torpedo maintenance, but dismissed the thought. Better to handle post-mission executions as they always did, once docked to a station. Right now he needed every single one of them if he was going to somehow break this cursed deadlocked engagement with the humans.
“Currentmaster!”
Aptor’s head twisted toward the sensor officer’s station, where the young egapocid was staring into his scopes, one arm waving furious for attention.
Aptor turned fully toward the sensor station and stood, mouth tentacles waving slightly in expectation. “Speak.”
“There were a set of gravitational anomalies on the surface of the planet, almost directly below us. The occurrences time perfectly with the movement of the gravitic effect we’ve already seen. I believe they are controlling that effect from down there.”
“What sort of anomalies?” Aptor asked.
“Exactly the type the Bright Father’s Avatar told us to watch for,” the officer replied, his mouth tentacles twitching with excitement.
The bridge crew intoned the required prayer at the mention of their god. The lights came back up a second after they concluded and a worshipful moan washed through his officers. Aptor had no problem believing the Bright Father’s influence was indeed universal. He just wondered if He was going to give them more help than turning the lights back on.
“A hidden base on the surface makes sense,” Wavisoc said, once again right by Aptor’s side. “We destroyed their main source of power when we cut the rear of their ship off. Whatever that gravitic effect actually is, it undoubtedly requires more power than that damaged ship is capable of.”
The wallscreens flickered back on all over the bridge. The sensor officer twisted a control and sent an optical image of the planet’s surface to the largest.
“Show me,” Aptor said.
The sensor officer twisted a control at his station and a green square appeared on the screen, overlaid on an area criss-crossed with steep canyons.
“I don’t see any sign of a base,” Wavisoc said, waving a dismissive hand at the display.
“Here,” the sensor officer said, manipulating his station controls, zooming in the image even more. “There are no artifacts visible, but notice here, here, and here.” Yellow circles appeared where he indicated, surrounding unnaturally regular patterns of blackened rock. Patterns that looked jus
t like—
“Scortch marks from landing craft!” Aptor declared.
“If that is true, Currentmaster,” Wavisoc said, “perhaps it’s better to simply drop a fission weapon down on top of them.”
Aptor reared back. “From orbit?”
“We must be absolutely sure they are destroyed,” Wavisoc said.
Aptor crossed his arms and walked slowly to his Bright Father-cursed, ill-fitting command chair, lowering himself down. After a long moment spent staring at the probably human base up on the wallscreen, he reached for the intercom control.
“No, Pessimist Wavisoc, we may still be able to retrieve this technology as our original mandate dictates. Imagine an egapocidian fleet armed with such.” He keyed the intercom. “Strongclaw Oonipol, prepare to launch your shuttles on my command.”
“Yes, Currentmaster,” Strongclaw Oonipol’s voice replied.
“Navigation,” Aptor said, centering himself on the chair and leaning back into it fully, “sound acceleration alert.”
Alarms pulsed and shrieked throughout the ship, warning the crew to hurry to their assigned stations and strap in.
***
Fazion jerked awake, his useless eyes flying open out of habit while his arms and legs flailed and kicked without coming into contact with anything. His inner ear told him he was falling, but he grimaced, concentrating as he regained fully consciousness, and realized the ship’s artificial gravity had been turned off.
Or it’s been destroyed, he thought.
Something was tapping on the right side of his helmet, and there was a constant, high-pitched whistling, like the world’s smallest tea kettle at a boil.
Leak!
Remembering his basic spacesuit training, his left arm felt for the emergency sealant kit on his belt, but the little hard-plastic case was gone, leaving only a twisted bracket behind. He needed to see. Focusing his mind’s eye inward, he saw that his wetware sensorium defaulted to standby, probably when he had been knocked unconscious. He unfolded the operating system and saw the link to Dao Van Khan’s little ventilation bot. He pressed it with a ghostly mental hand and the bot’s visual point of view leapt up to fill his mind.
He was looking at the right side of his spacesuit helmet from the bot’s point of view. It was tapping furiously at the side of his helmet with one wire-thin elasteel leg. Then Fazion saw the twisted spike of metal embedded in his suit’s visor. Maybe thirty centimeters long, three or four were inside his helmet; the jagged, needle-sharp tip had stopped millimeters from the bridge of his nose. He recoiled, unable to control the reflex to rip the metal out of his visor, to fling it away from him. He froze just before grabbing the thicker end that protruded from his helmet, listening to the tiny shriek of escaping air. If he pulled it free, it might destroy the entire faceshield. Fazion stopped himself and took a deep breath, looking at the space around him through the bot’s optics.
He was floating in the center of the main passageway that linked all the modules of the Path, a long hexagon ten meters wide with bulkheads every twenty-five meters. There was debris floating everywhere and parts of the passageway’s walls had come off, allowing damaged pipes and cables to float free. More disturbing than all the debris, Fazion realized he could see the starfield through large gaps in the hull. He was back in hard vacuum again.
“Hey!” he yelled to the bot, “Mr. Khan, are you driving the bot?”
The bot’s visual point of view swung back and forth. No. There was a trilling chirp coming over his suit radio, but Fazion didn’t have the correct discrimination apps to decode bot verbal info.
“Aadesh 49?”
One of the bot’s elasteel legs split at the tip, separating into a tiny four-finger hand. It waggled side to side.
“Kind of? Are you the shard?”
The bot’s vision bounced excitedly. It clapped its two front legs together, then gave him two tiny thumbs-up.
“Okay…if the shard is driving the bot, we’ve lost comms with the base again?”
Another tiny thumbs-up.
“Then we need to keep going, get to the lifeboat like Commander Bergman ordered. First, though, I need a little help.”
The bot looked the metal spike in his helmet up and down, then it looked back at his face, making Fazion flinch at the extent of the burns on his forehead and right cheek. Two of the tiny hands came up in the bot’s view and grabbed hold on either side of the optics. There was a twisting and a sudden jerk as the corridor spun and then stopped suddenly. Fazion heard a magnetic clunk on the right side of his helmet and the view stabilized. Fazion moved his head experimentally, and the optical image followed his movements exactly. The bot had disconnected its own head and magnetically attached it to his helmet.
Fazion looked at the bot, seeing its body for the first time. It wasn’t much more than a thick wedge of smooth metal, with the wider side facing forward. It stood on four long, thin elasteel legs, giving it the appearance of a spider.
“Thanks, little buddy,” Fazion said. “I’m leaking air and I don’t know what to do about this.” He pointed at the spike that had almost killed him.
The bot gave him a tiny salute and turned away, running down the length of Fazion’s body. When it reached his booted foot, it crouched, coiling the spindly legs underneath its little body, and then leapt across the five meters of space to the corridor wall. It landed like a gymnast and skittered along the wall to a bright orange emergency locker, identical to many others spread throughout the ship. The bot opened the locker and retrieved a blue canister that was at least five times bigger than its own body. It reached into the locker again and came out with a coiled length of cable. Letting the blue canister float free for a moment, Fazion watch the little bot’s legs unspool the cable and toss the empty cardboard tube aside. It took the end of the cable to the nearest freefall handhold. Little legs blurred as it wrapped and tied the cable off, gathering up the rest in a bundle against its body.
Something down the corridor flashed and Fazion looked to see a large piece of deck plate fly out, driven by an explosion. The plate pancaked against the far side of the passageway and rebounded slightly, slowly turning as it drifted. He realized the ship must be heavily damaged.
A slight impact jarred his left leg and he glanced down, expecting to see another piece of debris, but it was the bot, climbing up his body like a squirrel up a tree. It stopped near Fazion’s hand long enough to put the cable it in and pull his fingers closed. Fazion took the hint and grabbed the cable, pulling hand over hand for the wall. When he reached the side, he grabbed a handhold and found two more for his feet. Now that he was secure against the wall, the bot scrambled to his head with the blue bottle held up.
“If you pull it out—” he started, but stopped as the bot’s legs coiled around the spike. It held the bottle against his helmet and sprayed the contents, semi-transparent green goo, all around the area where the spike entered his visor. It let the bottle float free and wrapped two legs around the jagged metal, bracing itself with the other two. Fazion’s jaw clenched, afraid that it was going to come free and shatter his entire visor. The metal shifted, then moved a couple of centimeters. The bot stopped, grabbed the bottle, sprayed more goo, then resumed pulling at the metal. Fazion reached up and grabbed the end of the spike and helped the bot pull. He heard a slurp as it was wriggled free of his spacesuit’s visor, and the sound of escaping air went an octave higher before stopping completely. He looked at the little bot, still standing on his visor, looking down into his face through its own legs. It was clapping again. Fazion smiled and offered it his hand. The bot hopped on to it and clambered up his suit’s arm, stopping on his right shoulder and clamping on.
“Thank you for helping me,” Fazion said. “You want your head back?”
The bot waved its front two legs and then pointed at a tiny black circle on its front surface.
“Ah, okay. Redundant systems.”
The bot nodded.
“Think we can get a comms link back
up with the base?”
The drone shrugged, although how it did that without shoulders, Fazion wasn’t quite sure.
“Okay, it’s on us, then. Back to the mission. Which way is the FTL lifeboat?”
The bot leaned and pointed toward the nearer bulkhead. Fazion let go of the cable and started pulling himself along from handhold to handhold. The ship was shuddering randomly under his grip, vibrations coming and going like waves on a beach. There was nothing he could do about it, so he kept climbing.
Fazion allowed his mind to open fully within the wetware sensorium, shunting the task of climbing and watching where he was going to a side routine. The environment he unfolded into primary focus was the same he used in the lab or when working a particularly difficult math problem. All of his functions, algorithms and shortcuts were in there, kept like an orderly toolbox. Panting with the effort of the long climb, he quickly codified everything he could about their current situation, and mingled that data with all of the existing information he had about the base and the Path. Something like a course of action started to coalesce inside a whirling storm of data, and Fazion smiled.
“You know,” he said, trying to control his heavy breathing, “Doctor Bescond isn’t going to like it one bit, but I think I know how we beat those assholes.”
***
Matthew sat with his head on the countertop, eyes closed. They were going to die and there was nothing Six or any of the scientists could do about it. There would be no bonuses, no hedonistic tour of the best brothels on Mars. He wouldn’t even get to see the sun again. His wetware pulsed a priority alert into his mind. He rolled his head to the side enough to look up at the holo that showed the tactical plot around the hostile warship. He sat bolt upright and yelled.