Virago One: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 2)

by John Triptych

  “Well it’s your mess, you take care of it.”

  You brought her in here, you bastard. Ganz turned and floated away, keeping his angry comments to himself. He thought about shooting the colonel, but figured it could wait until the stowaway was dead.

  Through trial and error, Darian figured out the blind spots of the spacecraft’s surveillance cameras. All the corridors and bulkheads followed a standard construction pattern, and once she pinpointed the location of where the cameras were, she could push off at the last minute and float by just as the recording device’s attention was focused the other way. An entire section of the interior had lost their camera feeds after the hull was penetrated by an enemy munition when the main optical power links were blocked by debris. The moment Darian realized this, she quickly gathered more pieces of metal and composites that floated in the air and stuffed them into every exposed power conduit she could find.

  The maintenance tunnel up ahead of her seemed to get wider the closer she got to the end hatch. It must lead to a large chamber, maybe the drive or reactor room, she thought. Bracing herself at the edge of the entryway, Darian pulled at the lever and pushed it forward. Looking out into the large compartment beyond, she stifled a gasp.

  Docked along the side of the massive chamber was a shuttlecraft. Thirty meters tall, black hulled, and with a kite-shaped fuselage, the vessel had a slight resemblance to the old first generation F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters of the late Twentieth Century. Darian remembered being briefed by military advisors during an orientation meeting at NASA headquarters a few years before, hinting at the development of orbital landing craft to act as support and supply vessels for their larger space warships.

  Glancing at the thruster nozzle configuration at the rear of the smaller vehicle, Darian figured they must use conventional liquid chemical drives. If this shuttlecraft was fully fueled, then she might have a lot of tools to work with. A full ignition of the lander’s engines- while the bay doors were closed and the docking clamps still active- would probably cause major damage to the Virago’s internal structure. All she had to do now was to commandeer it.

  Her excitement rising, Darian pushed off from the edge of the maintenance tunnel and floated up towards the shuttle’s airlock. Reaching the smaller vessel’s main entryway, she gripped at the nearby handhold and took a look at the access panel beside the airlock door. The moment she activated the small screen it immediately asked her for a passcode.

  Darian bit her lip. She knew this would happen. Then she remembered that she still had the dead maintenance crewman’s access card that she had taken while in Argus Base. Pulling it out from her pouch, she placed the digital strip along the optical scanner of the security panel, hoping that luck was still with her.

  It was. The indicator light on the access panel turned green and the airlock door opened in front of her. Darian pulled herself inside and opened the adjoining hatch that led to the smaller craft’s cockpit. Turning on the shuttlecraft’s battery-powered APU, she started activating all the flight control systems before toggling the thruster ignition switch.

  Nothing happened. Hissing with frustration, Darian checked the readouts on the pilot’s console in front of her. It seemed that she had only maintenance level access to the shuttlecraft. There was another passcode that she needed to know before gaining full flight level permission. Bitterly annoyed, Darian slapped the console panel with her left hand. She was stuck.

  Wait a minute, she thought. If I have maintenance level access for this spacecraft, then maybe I can scrounge up a few things.

  Ganz heard a beeping noise in his helmet. Activating the smartglass on his visor, it showed there was an access alert in the shuttle bay. Cursing out loud, Ganz turned around and pushed off towards the opposite corridor. For the tenth time in the last few minutes, he checked and made sure that the pistol in his hand was ready to fire.

  It took him fifteen minutes to reach the main corridor leading towards the chamber that held one of the orbital landing craft. Using his virtual menu on the smartglass, he commanded CAIN to seal off all the exits as he floated up towards the open airlock of the shuttle.

  After latching onto the handhold beside the airlock, he stayed floating along the length of the fuselage while leading with his pistol. Using his helmet’s com-link, Ganz turned it to all channels so she could hear him. “I know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up and I won’t shoot you.”

  No one answered him.

  Ganz leaned over to until his he could see into the cockpit, at the same time he activated the pistol’s laser sight so he could shoot her without having to go into a firing stance. The inner hatch was open, and he didn’t see anyone inside. Ganz pulled his way through the hatch and looked at the readouts on the console. One part of the monitor showed a camera view. It was the woman, and she was hiding behind one of the docking clamps along the side of the shuttlecraft.

  “I got you now,” he said. Ganz quickly made his way back out of the airlock and pushed off towards the length of the shuttlecraft. There were several docking clamps, and these metal struts were attached to hardpoints along the smaller spacecraft. As he got to the top of the middle support beam, Ganz failed to notice that several nearby umbilical lines had been loosened.

  Crouching on top of the horizontal pillar, Ganz used his left hand to grip a nearby handhold, and then he swung down with the pistol ready to fire in his other hand. When he peered underneath the platform, all he noticed was a large detached fueling hose staring straight back at him. Where the hell did she go?

  Pulling herself out from beneath the support craft’s thruster nozzle, Darian looked up at him and activated the remote maintenance code with her smartglass. Less than a second later, the open pipeline sprayed a high intensity jet of H-LOX fuel onto the middle docking clamp. Ganz cried out as the force of the liquid fuel threw him against the side of the shuttle.

  Darian had taken a multi-flare gun from the emergency survival packs in the cockpit of the shuttlecraft. She aimed it at Ganz and fired. The resulting flare instantly ignited the rocket fuel floating all around him.

  Ganz let out a muffled scream as he was quickly engulfed in flames that resembled pulsating tentacles made of light. Instead of flickering tongues of heat, the fire beyond the fuel flow looked like a multitude of miniature radiant suns as they spread out across the internal hangar. The combination of concentrated atomic hydrogen and liquid oxygen created a maelstrom that was hot enough to melt aluminum. Ganz was dead a few seconds later and much of his body literally burned to ashes not long afterwards.

  Darian quickly ducked into the bell-shaped thruster nozzle of the shuttlecraft. A few minutes before she had vented the H-LOX fuel that was inside the smaller craft’s fuel tanks back into the Virago. Even though the nozzle would have been the hottest part of the spacecraft when the engines were active, it was also the most heat-resistant. There was a coolant module near the main exhaust port and she had loosened a number of tubes ahead of time in order to get it to work. Using her smartglass interface she activated it as the waves of heat began to intensify below her. Within a second, the small space around her was instantly immersed with flame retardant cooling foam. Darian hoped that it would be enough.

  A loud beeping noise on his console instantly woke Lawson up. He stared at the readouts with a shocked look in his eyes. He turned to look at Ruthven, who had been napping as well. “Colonel, there’s a fire in Shuttle Bay One.”

  Ruthven let out a dry cough as he struggled to regain his senses. “The module, is it sealed off?”

  Lawson hurriedly checked his console. “Yes, but the refueling lines have been damaged, CAIN automatically shut them down the moment the temperature inside the chamber went above normal, but there’s enough liquid fuel in there to rip the Virago in half.”

  “Open the bay doors and vent the fire out into space,” Ruthven said.

  Lawson typed the command into his console. “Done.”

  Ruthven tapped his com-links.
“Everyone, check in.”

  Herbert Eng Wu’s voice came online first. “Help! I’m still trapped in the fusion reactor area. Can I come out now?”

  “Wait,” Ruthven said. “Let me get confirmation with the others first.”

  “Da, I am still here in weapon bay,” Vlad Utkin said. “I heard loud bang. What happened?”

  “There was a fire in the first shuttle bay,” Ruthven said. “Ganz, come in, over.”

  Lawson was searching for the mercenary with his console. “I got a recorded video feed of Ganz entering the shuttle bay.”

  Ruthven sighed. “He must be dead then.”

  “Hold on,” Lawson said while keeping his eyes on the visual recordings. “The woman we’ve been looking for was also in there. Ganz sealed the whole place off before the fire happened. Looks like they both got burned.”

  “Okay, so they’re dead then,” Ruthven said. “How badly damaged is the Virago?”

  Lawson continued to check the numbers on his view screen. “We’re still somewhat overheated. In addition to assessing the fire damage, CAIN estimates two hours of repairs, at least.”

  Ruthven frowned. They were supposed to have linked up with the remote tanker by now. He was a punctual man and hated falling behind schedule. Nevertheless, he hadn’t expected himself to make it this far. “Okay, looks like Ganz and the mystery girl bought it. Herbert, you can get out of your cocoon now and help out with the repair work. We’ll be home free in another two hours.”

  Chapter 28

  Stilicho Jones leaned over the Intrepid commander’s right shoulder to look at the rear video camera feed. They had just passed by the orbital networks on the Moon, and it gave him a strange, haunted feeling to see all the abandoned space stations and refineries just floating out there. He wondered if it would ever be the same after this.

  There was a distant object at the port side of the Intrepid’s viewports. He pointed at it. “What’s that?”

  Major Mark Kelso kept his eyes on the main console. “That’s the Shaktimaan, India’s first and only military spacecraft. Her design is similar to ours, but it’s a little slower because that ship uses standard hydrogen for propellant on its NERVA drive, like the Russians.”

  “She’s going to help us out?”

  Kelso shook his head. “Nope. It’s been ordered to protect Indian assets in Moon orbit only. A couple of Russian rockets are escorting the evacuation fleet back to Earth. Then again, it’s not like they can do anything against the Virago, so it would be a waste anyway.”

  Stilicho sighed. “Did everyone head back to Earth?”

  “Those that could are trying to,” Kelso said. “The rest are hunkering down in the underground colonies in the Moon’s surface, or trying to run to Mars, but if the Virago wanted to, it would definitely get there before them.”

  Captain Keith Emerson placed his hand over his earpiece. “Just received word from Space Command Ground Control. They lost contact with the Orion fleet after it engaged the Virago.”

  Stilicho grimaced. “Crap, that’s it then. It’s all up to us now. How far are we from that damned tanker?”

  “Another hour,” Kelso said. “We’ve already begun a breaking maneuver.”

  “We’re decelerating? Shouldn’t we be going faster?”

  Spencer Sittig, the Intrepid’s pilot, glanced back to him. “We need to match the target’s speed and heading to intercept, otherwise we’ll zoom right past it.”

  “I get it,” Stilicho said.

  Rawls, the chief engineer, leaned forward while looking at a new contact on his console. “Commander, we got a problem.”

  Kelso twisted his head to look at him. “What is it?”

  “It’s the Virago,” Rawls said. “She’s accelerating and heading towards us.”

  Kelso cursed. Their course trajectory must have been found out. He knew it would have been just a matter of time, but he hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. “We’re like a goddamned rowboat trying to outrun the USS Missouri. We don’t have the delta-v to get away.”

  Stilicho gulped. “So you’re saying we’re dead?”

  “Hold on,” Rawls said. “I’ve been thinking of a way to buy more time.”

  “We’re all ears,” Kelso said.

  “They know our course, so they know we’re heading for the tanker,” the chief engineer said. “But what if we alter our spacecraft trajectory and head for them instead?”

  Stilicho rolled his eyes. What kind of a brilliant plan was this? “We’ll still be dead either way.”

  “The Intrepid will probably buy it, but you could still make it,” Rawls said to him. “We could launch you and Captain Emerson here and put the both of you on an intercept course for the tanker. If we can create a big enough distraction, then maybe you both could get there before the Virago figures it out.”

  “How are you going to do that? Have you got a smaller spaceship in this rocket of yours I didn’t know about?” Stilicho asked.

  Rawls smiled faintly. “Not a spacecraft. We got four anti-ship missiles. Solid-state fuel rockets with a delta-v of ten kilometers per second.”

  Stilicho started coughing. “What? You want me to hitch a ride on a missile?”

  “It’s a damned good idea,” Kelso said. “We disarm the warheads on them and launch all four missiles, with different elliptical trajectories towards the tanker, so the Virago wastes precious time trying to intercept each one. The missile you’ll be riding in will perform a deceleration maneuver instead, so the Virago will think it malfunctioned and hopefully leave you alone.”

  “Jesus H Christ,” Stilicho said. “Can it be done?”

  “We’ve got to get things moving,” Kelso said. “Rawls, can you help them out?”

  Rawls started unstrapping himself from the restraints. “I’m on it, Commander.” He turned to look at Stilicho and Emerson. “One of you should wear a hard suit, because we’ve got an EVA thruster pack that you’ll need to wear. The other one should be in a skinsuit to be able to perform modification work on the missile.”

  “I’ve got experience with those thruster packs, so I’ll be wearing the hard suit,” Emerson said.

  Stilicho’s shoulders started shaking. “I’ve never done a spacewalk before, much less hold on to a missile while doing so.”

  Emerson opened the cockpit door and gestured at him to go ahead first. “Think of it as rocketship without a habitable cabin. It’s the same concept after all.”

  Stilicho turned to look at the three man crew of the Intrepid. He knew it would be the last time he would see them. He held his hand out and shook each of theirs. “I appreciate the effort, gentlemen.”

  Kelso gave him a confident wink. “Just put in a good word for us when you’re back on Earth.”

  Major Vince Lawson shook his head while manning his console at the Virago’s battlesphere. “Why are they still fighting us? It makes no sense.”

  “We’ll be at full acceleration in about thirty minutes,” Colonel Ruthven said. “We ought to catch up to them pretty quickly.”

  Lawson turned his head to look at his commander. “Marlon, do we have to take them out too?”

  Ruthven narrowed his eyes. Lawson never addressed him by his first name before. Was he starting to lose it? “We’ve got to, Vince, they have point defense guns and they could destroy the tanker if they get too close to it.”

  Lawson let out a deep breath. “Goddamn it.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” Ruthven said softly. “I’ll handle it.”

  A loud beeping noise startled them.

  Herbert Eng Wu sat up and strained against the crash webbing on his chair. “What was that?”

  Vlad Utkin stared calmly at the readouts on his console. “They fired missiles it seems.”

  “At us?” Herbert asked nervously.

  Ruthven cursed. “No, they fired it at the tanker. Looks like three are accelerating away in different directions but using the same heading. One looks like it’s a malfunctioning dud
. I’m going full throttle to get into weapons range and take them out.”

  Stilicho clenched his teeth while keeping a tight grip on the missile’s grid fins. He was riding a ten meter long cylindrical tube with a blunt end on its tip, since missiles didn’t need to be aerodynamic in space. The heating coils embedded in his skinsuit were keeping him from freezing to death, but being in space felt like floating in a dark, airless pit with no end in sight. He had only a few minutes of pre-breathing exercises to get his body used to the pure oxygen he was inhaling through the life support unit on his back, and his joints were already experiencing tingling muscle aches.

  Captain Keith Emerson was tethered at the opposite side. He wore the much bulkier hard suits that USAF space troopers were known for. Unlike Stilicho, his suit had full atmospheric pressure and gas mixes, and he felt fine. “I think it’s time you activated that AI of yours, Jones.”

  Stilicho tapped his helmet. “Maia, you reading me?”

  Like an angel, Maia’s calm, reassuring voice helped put him at ease. “Hello, Stil. I have been silently updating all information streams for the last several hours. I must say, what you are doing is a very courageous thing.”

  “Thanks for the encouragement,” Stilicho said. “I need you to guide this missile and get it as close as possible to the tanker so we can use Emerson’s EVA thruster to fly over to it.”

  “Calculating,” Maia said. “I can control the missile’s AI system. Do I have your permission to do so?”

  “Yes, yes!”

  “Preparing missile ignition,” Maia said. “Second stage thruster will activate in five seconds. Stand by for deceleration.”

  Stilicho clenched his jaw and gripped the grid fins as tight as he could.

  The moment the missile’s engine ignited, the decelerating force hurled him backwards, and he lost his grip on the fins. Stilicho screamed as his tether line became taut, and he suddenly bounced back towards the missile’s fuselage at a breakneck velocity. Just as he thought he was about to violently smash into the side of the missile, the munition gimbaled its thruster again, and Stilicho suddenly flew past it. The tether line strained against the competing forces and he was thrust backwards once more.