Spinward Fringe Broadcast 5: Fracture

by Randolph Lalonde

  “I found it intimidating at first too,” Agameg whispered from the tactical command station. “They use a different kind of system where you're from?”

  Ayan nodded as she settled in and looked at the status update of the boarding actions. “More simplified, but I'm also not trained on carrier operations.”

  Agameg Price paused a moment, cocking his head. “I didn't find it was that complicated when I was keeping watch on the bridge. May I see the display?”

  Ayan made the command display public for a moment so everyone could see the half circle of holographic interfaces that surrounded her. Jason shook his head and chuckled. “Now I know why Oz disappeared for three months for up training before he took command of the Roi De Ceil. Multi-Mission Interfaces are no picnic at first.”

  Agameg’s green eyes stretched open into perfect glimmering circles and he made a chuffing sound of surprise. “The bridge watch status displays are much simpler. I understand your surprise and apologize.”

  Ayan smiled as she made the display private again, glancing at a few others on the bridge who looked up long enough to see the myriad of images and information that the Captain was expected to monitor. She hadn't had much of a chance to get to know Agameg, or anyone else aboard for that matter, but she had to admit he was one of her favourite crew members so far. She'd never met a shape shifter who remained in their native form before, and there were times when she caught herself staring. He'd just smile and wink, as though he knew she meant no harm. “It's all right. The systems on Triton are a lot easier to use in some ways. This much information on a Freeground terminal would be a lot more...” she searched for the word, distracted by the holo feed of Jacob's boarding action. They were almost completely through the inner airlock door.

  “Raw,” Jason finished for her. “I know, the operating system on this ship is amazing. It's only a little intelligent without an AI, something it has in common with Freeground software, only it's like the Sol system programmers are about a hundred years ahead.”

  Ayan tried not to react as Jake neutralized the pair of slaves that had been marked as volatile. The nanobots he injected them with interfered with the chemical reaction taking place in their breastbones with no time to spare. Jake's heart rate dropped as soon as he was sure they were the only two walking bombs he had to deal with.

  Her eye was drawn to Stephanie's mission status. She led her squads into a primary airlock and they immediately engaged a group of enslaved raiders. The firefight seemed desperate at first. Suddenly the enemy stopped firing, someone out of sight screamed and Ayan realized that the Captain aboard the Palamo had somehow activated the detonation sequence for the raiders aboard the station.

  “I need you to retreat, Chief Vega. Now.” Ayan said quickly and clearly.

  “Backtrack!” Stephanie called out. They made it just around the corner before the halls ahead of them exploded, rocking the point of view perspectives on her holographic display. Ayan brought up the summarized status displays for the squads and breathed a sigh of relief as she saw Chief Vega's people had gotten to the minimum safe distance. “Thank you Ayan. Glad to have you in transmission range.”

  “This is the Cold Reaver. It looks like the raiders pinning us down committed some kind of suicide. One of our landing struts are damaged but we're all right.”

  “Your guess isn't far off Cold Reaver. Let Chief Vega do a sweep of the area before you begin loading the injured.”

  “Aye, sitting tight until we get the all clear.”

  “Chief Vega, do a sweep between the Cold Reaver and the people we have at the inner door. When you arrive at the inner door I'd like you to affix a conductive wire to the superstructure of the station then connect it to your reserve comm unit. We might be able to get a signal through the electromagnetic field they have set up.”

  “Will do Ayan,” Stephanie replied.

  “Ayan, what's going on?” Jake asked over his private comm.

  “It looks like the remainder of the raiders were just killed,” Ayan's eyes went wide as she saw the Jake's boarding mission from his perspective. His sidearm was perfectly aimed at a wealthy looking fellow's head.

  “My scan of his slave control unit tells me there's one more on the ship but the detonation order came from this one. He killed thirty one of his own people before handing it over to me.”

  She listened as Jake told the Captain to give him the password. “Ask him why he's killing his own people on the station,” Ayan directed quietly.

  Jake was interfaced with the amulet the Captain used to control his slaves and the first password attempt failed. It warned him that he'd only get two more attempts. “I'm going to get the password and make sure the slaves are safe. They'll tell me what's going on on the station once they're free,” he whispered. There was a determination in his tone that sounded dangerous.

  Ayan had heard it before on the First Light right before he ordered them to mercilessly obliterate a light carrier. She eyed the log being uploaded from the amulet. Captain Gammin didn't just use the control unit and slave implants to kill people, he used them to administer drug cocktails that made certain members more suggestible, rendered female members of the crew mostly unconscious and boosted alertness in others. The crimes Captain Gammin committed using the devices were endless and according to what she was seeing he was constantly adding new slaves to his crew. The most common use for his amulet was torture, mostly on a young woman named Nerine.

  She found the serial number of the other controller and brought up a cross section of the Palamo. A red dot designated the amulet's location, it was in one of the hangars.

  A glance back at Jake's status told her that he'd managed to deactivate the Captain's control unit. “Kneel,” she heard him demand.

  “Jake, we have a brig. We might need him for more information. He could be a member of a larger group,” Ayan said hurriedly. She watched the rest of the exchange and cringed as Captain Gammin tried to bargain with Jake. Captain Valance's heart rate jumped, his neural statistics indicated a level of anger that would have most Freeground officers relieved of duty and suspended for a month.

  “He won't do this again.” Jake whispered over the private comm as he pulled the trigger.

  Ayan looked away just in time to avoid seeing the mess his sidearm made of the man.

  “What is it?” Jason asked in a whisper.

  She shook her head and forwarded the whole record of Jake's boarding action to Jason. The display listed a new contact on the tactical map, a thirty four meter hyperspace capable ship. “Oz, do you see this?” she asked.

  “It's up on my screen. My birds are on patrol, the party's over so I can spare a pair,” Oz replied over bridge communications.

  “I'll have Chief Frost hit them with EMP rounds. There's a slave controller on that ship, I want it disabled before we bring it aboard,” Ayan informed him.

  “All right, once it's disabled I'll have a Uriel haul it into landing bay two.”

  Frost came up on her display; “Somethin' for my gunners to shoot, lass?”

  “Aye, disable only. Use EMP rounds.”

  “Done and done,”

  For the space of three seconds five heavy gunnery turrets opened fire, sending hundreds of EMP railgun rounds towards the small interstellar ship. A flare of electromagnetic bursts obscured it for several seconds as the rounds discharged and the Triton’s tactical system noted it as inert when the vessel came back into focus.

  “There you go, Oz. Have it brought in then take the command chair. I'm going down with four squads to meet whoever's on board personally.”

  “Already tired of commanding a carrier?” Oz asked with a chuckle.

  “No, I want to see what kind of scum they dislodge from that ship and meet it personally. Jason can fill you in on what we're seeing up here.”

  “All right, on my way up. Chief Vercelli has Flight Command.”

  “Going to offer him the same treatment Jake gave Captain Gammin?” Jason asked as she st
ood.

  “Nope. This one's all yours once we get him to the brig. We need information about these people and the sector we're in.”

  He genuinely smiled. “Time to put all that interrogation training to work, oh boy. Do you want me to start communicating with the rest of the raider ships and seeing if any of them want to join us now that our Captain has made a mess of their captor?"

  Ayan smiled at him over her shoulder. "Always the clever one. Just make sure we have enough room for fighters once the ships are finished landing."

  * * *

  It only took Ayan a few minutes to change into the combat vacsuit that the fabrication centre had made for her. It felt like a second skin and she couldn't help but smile a little as all the improvements her and Laura had developed during their time together at Special Projects came on line.

  She left the head gear retracted into a hood and strapped her sidearm on as she made her way to one of the main lifts. Two squads were waiting for her when she arrived. The other pair were already in the main hangar.

  She was the subject of many sidelong glances at first. Of all of them she was the shortest, but she wore the same armour and had seven slashes on her cuffs, designating her rank as the same as the Captain's. He'd appointed her to the position without telling her and left her to seek out her own place on the ship. It led her to test her skills and get some practice at commanding the Triton in simulation and to her surprise she managed to take control. It wasn't easy, far from it. The Triton was designed as a multi-role close combat carrier and mission platform. It had the capacity to run several operations all at once, acting like a mother ship with sub crews.

  Lucius Wheeler had never used the vessel to its full potential in any respect, and it was becoming plain to her that Jake had every intention of doing just that. Oz increasingly took care of day to day operations while Jason organized the security office like an intelligence unit. The Chiefs Jake had appointed were getting better at their jobs and respected the help offered by the former First Light crew. The only Chief that didn't directly benefit from their military experience was Frost, the Gunnery Chief. He was already amazing at his job even though he was a mess off duty in many respects.

  Ayan couldn't help but muse about how it felt like a month had passed since she arrived aboard the Triton. It had actually been fourteen days and she had done so much it boggled her mind. With the right direction the crew made fantastic accomplishments and responded very well to her clarity and positive reinforcement even though three in ten often required more training. The largest project she'd participated in was the construction of two replacement engines in the main hangar. When they had settled into the obscured portion of the asteroid field they would replace the pair that Wheeler and the Saviour had ruined.

  The one thing that bothered her about the two weeks was the little time she'd had to spend with Jake. She felt as though they were drifting, as though he was becoming less and less open to her as time went on and she was often at a loss for words. Being told she was his biggest problem was the ultimate statement of how far they'd managed to drift apart. She suppressed the wave of emotion as it threatened to overtake her and set her expression in a stern, hard stare.

  “If you don't mind me saying so, Ma'am, it's good to meet you. My name's Sean Orlando.” introduced the lieutenant standing beside Ayan.

  "I'm glad to meet you too." She had read that he was one of the surviving military officers from the Enreega system. The details of the taking of the Triton and the refugees from Enreega kept her up far later than she'd prefer to admit a few nights beforehand. The stories were a compilation of several journal recordings volunteered by the crew threaded together with Jacob's accounting.

  He was surprisingly articulate. The intelligence and expressive quality of Jonas Valent was in there along with a more sardonic wit and a sort of confidence that came from experience. It was all recorded before Jonas Valent's memories surfaced. That's what struck her.

  He spoke of taking a turn for the better when he decided to rescue instead of steal a cargo train filled with slaves. Seeing so many people stowed away for transport, mistreated and left in a barely liveable cargo hold while the hauler dragged them between solar systems was like a personal insult to him. He wished he had remained behind and ensured that the Galleon hauling the slaves was actually destroyed and decided to check arrival logs whenever he made port.

  So much had happened to him and the crew of the Samson since they had made that decision, to rescue the slaves instead of steal them for Regent Galactic. It was just as Jacob said in the log; “Some decisions change everything that follows. If I didn't turn away from profit and choose to help those slaves find their freedom I wouldn't have taken the Triton, been in a position to take people on from Enreega and I wouldn't have met Ayan in her time of need.”

  That was one of the things that touched Ayan, that she was a consideration in possibly the most influential chains of events in his life. The story that Security Chief Stephanie Vega had pieced together from other people's logs that led up to and continued from their encounters in the Enreega system was riveting, she couldn't finish reviewing it in one sitting, though she wished she could. It explained how the current crew members came together, why so many of them were unwaveringly loyal and part of the mythology that seemed to surround her former self and Jonas.

  Since she'd come aboard eyes were on her and she'd done her best to live up to the expectations of the crew, directing the construction of the new engines, teaching when she had time and being a good commander. Much of it was within the scope of her training, but whenever someone looked at her with adoration or admiration she was surprised. She'd mentored junior officers before, but being at the heart of a ship wide mythology was completely different.

  She still hadn't settled in new quarters. The decision was up to her, but being in the more common junior officers quarters seemed right until she was firm in her choice. Stephanie had presented her with options for accommodations, offering senior officers quarters in the command section, the aft dorsal guest quarters which were lavish enough to make her too embarrassed to move in and she finished her offer of accommodations with an apartment in the botanical gallery. That was where she wanted to be most, but it didn't feel right somehow. She didn't feel like moving from one place to another when being on Triton felt somehow transient. As though she were just stopping there for a short time before moving on. It was a feeling that plagued her ever since she woke for the first time in Freedom Tower on the Freeground colony.

  She'd discussed it with Minh-Chu, who had proven to be a fantastic friend. He seemed to fit in perfectly, making a name for himself in a matter of days, taking the lead of the new squadron and teaching everyone a few things about what it meant to be a fighter pilot. Excitement, humour, enthusiasm all had their place as long as you did your job well, approached each task with the seriousness it demanded and looked out for each other was a philosophy he proved by example. Even though he was a daring, excitable pilot, there were few fighter jocks who wouldn't take him as their wingman or fly on his wing.

  Life on the ship was easy for him, easier than it was for her. He had already taken the Wing Commander's quarters at the fore of the lower decks, in front of the pilot's berthing. The view from there looked out from the front of the ship and he had a perfect view of ships landing in any of the three hangars beneath.

  After reviewing the history of the ship since Jacob and his crew had taken over she was most amazed at how eventful and encouraging it was. Ayan found it intimidating at times, she had to admit but more than anything she hoped that she could be a part of that story. That she could make good choices and, even though they saw her as a kind of icon already, gain respect as a commander.

  The lift door opened and she snapped herself back to the present. She was surrounded by soldiers and they awaited her order. Ayan led them out into the busy hangar. They were working on a fighter that had just arrived with severe damage. They had to use a pry-bar to
loosen the cockpit of the Uriel fighter. Regardless of the numerous dents and scorches the fighter had done its job protecting the pilot and her SIO, defending the Triton, engaging her enemies and bringing back the ship they had disabled only minutes before.

  The disabled ship that the Uriel fighter had hauled in was an old half oval shaped yacht that had seen better days. Before the heavy duty elevator had finished raising it to be flush with the deck the main hatch slid aside. Several humans in dirty old service jumpsuits and partial vacsuits of various clip or zip together designs escorted a bloodied older woman. Her golden hair hung dishevelled, her lip was broken open, her left arm hung at an awkward angle, her eye socket and cheek were already puffing, changing colour.

  Two crew members, a man and a woman, dragged her forward and tossed her on the deck. Ayan looked the forming crowd of twenty three over as her built in scanning equipment displayed results on the inside edge of her hood. After a moment she confirmed that the beaten older woman was the only one without a slave implant. She exhaled slowly, steadying her nerves. Ayan had never been faced with a situation in any way similar to what she was seeing. Refugee slaves that had a little time with one of their captors but were good enough to let her live. “All right, someone call for a medical team and stay close. Time to make friends,” she whispered to the security personnel surrounding her.