Spinward Fringe Broadcast 5: Fracture

by Randolph Lalonde

  "Do you know her?" Paula asked as she put the tray down.

  Minh took his steaming bowl of vegetable vishri lo mein and tall container of water from the tray. "Five minutes ago, no. Now? Well, I think I've met her, but I wouldn't say I know her."

  Paula nodded curtly as she finished moving her fruit bowl and cherry juice from the tray. "She's kind of light headed. You know, lights are on but-" she ended the comment with a shrug before tossing the tray onto another nearby table.

  Minh looked at Ashley and tilted his head as though slightly confused and considered her very closely. He knew she noticed him looking out of the corner of her eye. She pretended not to be aware as she took a sip from her straw. She'd changed her vacsuit since she got off duty, the one she wore had a gold Chinese dragon drawn up her leg and back so it looked like it was climbing the dark brown fabric. Her straight black hair fell over the dragon down to her waist. She didn't wear a sidearm like most officers, himself included. Looking at her side profile, he could tell it was taking a great effort for her not to break into a shy smile.

  "Minh?" Paula asked, looking over her shoulder irritably.

  He looked back at Paula, shaking himself free of his surprising daze and smiled. "I don't know her well enough to say if anyone's home."

  "Trust me, I'm surprised we've survived this long with her at the helm."

  Minh nodded absently and cracked his chopsticks apart.

  "I think the only reason why she's here is because the Captain bought her from some slaver two years ago, at least that's what I hear. She was a serving slave of some kind, I'd rather not guess which kind."

  "How are things going on the hangar decks?" Minh redirected.

  "They'd be better if the Captain didn't have us taking on a new wreck every half hour. We've packed every spare hole we have in storage, even in manufacturing storage, and the night crew will be taking three more in. He wants to keep them clamped above landing bays."

  "That's not so bad."

  "I'm afraid someone's going to smash right into them, with the way the fighters land and what happens if we have to take another ship in, like in an emergency? We'll only have two elevation shafts available it'll take forever to get fighters loaded into the main hangars too."

  "Those cockpits are pretty comfortable. I'm looking forward to taking a nap in one if I ever have to take one through a wormhole."

  "Sounds dangerous. Something that small maintaining and travelling through a wormhole."

  "One Uriel has enough power to run most of the Clever Dream's systems. They're nice ships."

  "But there's nowhere to move. You'd be stuck in the same position for hours, days maybe."

  "That's what the muscle stimulators and indoor plumbing in a pilot's vacsuit is for."

  "I'm eating," Paula reminded, holding up a materialized half peach. It had been made so each half was small enough to be bite sized. "Anyway, what are we going to do with nine ships that are almost ready for scrap?"

  "They don't look like they're in bad shape from the ones I've seen. Maybe he's starting a used ship lot? I know I've flown worse."

  "You're not serious. I mean, with people after us it's no time to start a business."

  "Of course I'm not serious," Minh smiled mildly.

  "I can never tell when you're joking," Paula shook her head slowly. "Anyway, I don't know what we're doing out here. At least when Alice was in charge we seemed to find a direction. Now, it feels like we're just falling into things."

  Minh's first instinct was to react in defence of his Captain, to blindly state his faith in his Captain, but he held back when he noticed Ashley listening in from where she sat several meters behind Paula. He didn't know what her life was like before she'd met Jacob Valance, but looking at her and considering the trust he'd placed in her as Master of the Helm, it looked like he had made at least one good decision. She had marked Jake as her only pilot trainer in her profile after all. He'd done a good thing, freeing her, and with his actions on the Palamo, as harsh as he'd heard they were, his decisions seemed consistent. "See a slave, free a slave," he said loud enough for anyone listening in to casually overhear. "Anyone who can give someone with nothing a place on their ship and win can set my course anytime."

  Chapter 13

  Morning

  The main launch deck of the Triton was silent. The Clever Dream was set up in the centre of the dimly lit expansive space with all the boarding ramps lowered. Its hull gleamed as though it was fresh from the manufacturer, only the new power generation and energy collection systems were in place, expanding its girth, giving its long black hull a muscular appearance. It was a long range, luxury gunship, one of the only ever built, and it looked fully restored.

  Jake heard boot steps coming down the cockpit crew ramp and turned to see Alice. She looked exactly as she did when he met her on the Triton. Under her worn imitation leather bomber jacket she wore a blue vacsuit and heavy gun belt. She was armed with the duplicate of the same heavy sidearm he'd used for years. “Hi dad,” she smiled.

  He rushed forward and took her into his arms before she stepped off the ramp.

  There was nothing guarded or restrained about her laugh as he spun her once and put her down. “Good to see you too,” she beamed.

  “Where are you coming from?” Jake asked.

  “Not far. Making a few last minute adjustments before I go.”

  “Already? You should stay for a while. Everyone from the First Light is here, they're looking forward to meeting you.”

  “I can't, father. I have to go.”

  In the blink of an eye he realized that she didn't look like the woman he'd met on the Triton. Facially she appeared as she did when she was only an artificial intelligence on his wrist, a constant companion he had programmed since he was seventeen until he was thirty four. “The neural therapy's working. You'll be on your feet in a couple of days,” he reassured.

  Alice's smile faded. “I can't connect to that body anymore. Whatever unique brain structure that woman had that let me transfer her has been repaired. I can't go back. Not completely.”

  “I can have them recreate the conditions, we can bring you back,” Jake took her arm.

  Her brow furrowed. “It's too late. I'm in your memory system right now, a little light on data, but Iloona was right; my human personality survived. I only wish she was right about the rest. I'm moving on, using your comm system to transfer myself to the hypertransmitter.”

  “You've made the jump to digital, why do you have to keep going?”

  “I'll never forget my time on the Triton. If I had to do it all again I'd do exactly the same.”

  “We can help you.”

  Alice shook her head. “I wish I had more time with you. In person, as a human. Thank you for showing me the trust and love of family.”

  “Tell me what I can do to fix this. I'll do anything!”

  “I know, that's why I have to leave. I love you father,”

  The hangar and Alice faded from sight. He woke to the sound of the door opening behind him. Iloona rushed in and looked at the status screen behind the bed for a long moment.

  Jake saw her nose twitch with worry, her hands clench together and he finally looked at the status display himself. All the activity readings for Alice's brain functions were in the red. The bed was forcing her to breathe, keeping her heart beating. The clock on the display said he'd been asleep for seven hours.

  He lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss against her fingers. He put it back in its place with great care and turned away.

  “I'm sorry. I don't know how but the therapy failed. She's gone Captain,” Iloona said consolingly.

  Captain Valance nodded once and strode out of the infirmary. “Bridge, shut down all power to hypertransmitter and wormhole systems.”

  “Yes sir,” replied an officer from engineering. Who it was, he was unsure. “But Craig in communications informs me that a high compression micro wormhole just formed and closed. A few encrypted gi
gabytes of information was transmitted and then deleted from our system.”

  “Thank you,” He replied flatly as he closed the comm channel. Jake's stony expression and cold gaze were enough to press people out of his way as he marched to the bridge.

  He briefly checked the crew status on his command unit and opened a channel to Ayan. "You're overdue. What's going on?"

  Jake took a second look at his command unit, using the two dimensional display so no one else would see what he was doing as he stepped into a busy lift car. The system reported that his connection was unidirectional, her comm wasn't connecting to his. He selected Finn's comm and tried to connect unsuccessfully. The lift doors opened to exchange passengers. "Express car override, command authority, take me to the bridge," he told the system.

  Everyone in the elevator fell silent and either looked at him in surprise or did their best to look like they weren't paying attention at all.

  The system didn't acknowledge his command and he irritably reached between two passengers and punched the instructions into the control panel. The car picked up speed, travelling several dozen meters horizontally before accelerating upwards towards the forward command section of the ship.

  Everyone between Captain Valance and the express car exit stepped aside and when they opened he strode out then across the concourse and straight onto the bridge. The heavy armoured doors were wide open and he stopped at the control panel to increase the security level so they would remain closed unless someone who was authorized to be on the bridge needed to enter or leave.

  "Open a comm line to Ayan or anyone on the station team. They're overdue," he ordered as he strode to the command seat.

  "I can't make a connection with any of them. It's like all their comms are deactivated."

  "Raise Chief Vega and the Cold Reaver," Captain Valance ordered as he checked the status of his command crew. Jason and Laura were already awake, having breakfast in the observation lounge. He put him on high alert, knowing that his command and control unit would flash red and direct him to the bridge immediately.

  "I can't get them either."

  "Are we being jammed?"

  "No, it's like they're not answering," sir.

  "Start a general repeating hail to the station on all frequencies. If there's someone with a working comm over there I want to speak to them." Jake ordered the night communications officer, he was a younger fellow, recently qualified. "Commander Everin is on his way, he'll handle the signal scanning and more advanced work." He looked to his right and saw that Oilimae, the night tactical officer was at her post. The issyrian had been trained by Agameg, and had good numbers from simulations and qualifications. "What does the station look like right now?"

  Oilimae made the station the primary focus of the bridge's main holographic tactical display before replying, centring on the section that Ayan's team was last reported in. "Our readings indicate that thirty five percent of the station now has life support. Commander Ayan's teams and the Cold Reaver are within the repaired section."

  "How much of the station had life support before?"

  "Before the Commander's team arrived?"

  "Yes."

  "Less than eight, sir."

  "Well, she did a good job."

  "Reporting as ordered, Captain," Jason said as he ducked under the heavy bridge door behind the command seat. "When I brought Crewcast online last week I didn't think I'd be seeing an alert level summons for a while, what's up?"

  "Ayan's team is overdue and unreachable. My comm says her last check in was a little over two hours ago."

  "That's not like her," Jason commented as he took the lead communications position.

  "You have ten minutes to get us in touch before I take a team station side," Jake informed him.

  Chapter 14

  Communication Breakdown

  "Do you know who those people are? It's like we jumped out of the frying pan and landed on the sun! We can't hold their people! They're trying to communicate, it's only a matter of time before they send someone over and then we'll wish the raiders were still trying to break in!" shouted an unshaven man in a stained white smock.

  "Shut up Brad! Your panicking isn't helping!" A bald woman shouted back, bringing her hand down hard on the common room table. The emergency communications terminal rattled. The display blinked green and blue, indicating that a general transmission was coming in. "I don't know for sure who that is, and neither do you! All I know is that they just came in and took out a whole fleet of raiders like it was routine cleanup and they're not from the company. Now that we have more doors to close, we're closing them until we can get a supervisor on comms or an emergency frigate in range."

  "That's the Triton! You ever hear of the Triton? Maybe you heard of Captain Valance? He sent his people here to help us and thanks to you lot, we've shut the doors and trapped them inside! Do you know what someone like that does to someone who crosses him? We're done, Larissa, bloody finished!"

  "It's a myth, ten times the bark to once the bite. What we have here is too important to let someone who isn't with the company to see, and if more of his people come aboard they will see what we're sitting on!"

  "Shut your yaps! Both of you! We've got everything locked down tight for now. It's a pity we have to keep the repair people they sent over under wraps, but we knew it would be necessary when they offered their help," a woman in a heavy vacsuit said calmly. "Oberman should have the MWorm generator reconnected any minute and then we can contact the company. They'll have someone here in a day or two."

  "Seventeen hours, that's how long it takes a rescue ship to get here, seventeen hours," Brad specified. He sat down in one of the old steel chairs so hard it creaked. The common room was furnished to seat many, but not too comfortably. Stark white and grey speckled flooring, bare metal walls and a dozen utility tables with chairs made for a dingy recreation area, but it was effective. One wall was spattered with dried blood, against it were the remains of a cafeteria serving bot. Its six arms hung limply and the cables that had been torn free when they managed to get to its power cell and remove it remained as they had been since the Holocaust Virus had struck the station.

  "We'll be fine 'till then. We just have to keep our heads, keep whoever's out there away from us and we'll start rebuilding."

  "Rebuilding? You can start rebuilding. I'm transferring out," Brad scoffed. "That's if they don't just open fire until we crumble and drop out of orbit."

  "Even if they are who you think they are, why would they? We have at least thirty of their people plus whoever's trapped in that gunship in the secondary landing bay."

  "Okay, fine. So you rebuild. With who? Before all hell broke loose this station had what? Six hundred indentured miners and support personnel?"

  "Actually, it was a little over a thousand including the station crew and technicians," Larissa corrected as she sat down at the table.

  "Okay, one thousand. How are you going to staff up? We're down to fifty three."

  "I won't have to worry about that, this operation is so important that the company will leave anyone half way qualified here. Besides, when they see we have eleven tons of raw diamond ready to ship, they'll have to."

  "But the Triton has got to have gotten a scan off on the core of the station. There's no way they've been sitting out there this long without finding a way to scan through the magnetic barrier."

  "Have you ever gotten a scan to read through the barrier?"

  "No, Amanda, I haven't. That's a bloody big carrier out there though, unlike I've ever seen. Who knows what they can do?"

  "Oberman here," the intercom crackled overhead. "MWorm gennie is up and running. Are we talking to the repair guys who fixed the power yet?"

  Amanda activated the intercom switch on the neck of her loose vacsuit. "No. Make sure that line is secure and go help everyone else secure the station. I'm calling the company. Oh, and if you can get power to those cannon mounts so they can look operational..."

  "That's d
oable. I can even get them rotating but they'll never fire."

  "As long as it looks like we can fight, we just have to make sure they keep their distance."

  "Right. On my way."

  She took the portable console from Larissa, brought a listing of primary contacts up on the screen and initiated communications. The display turned a light shade of green as it verified that the micro wormhole generator was online and creating a high compression wormhole to a relay station light years away. The lights dimmed noticeably. The three station officers waited patiently, Brad absent mindedly tugged on his goatee.

  A brown Caran Enterprises screen came up. The square, diamond and circle logo hovered just above the lettering. Amanda selected a rotating exclamation point. It moved to the centre of the screen and rotated for several seconds before a squarish face appeared. "You are recognized, Amanda Dimitri. The senior Foreperson on Ossimi Ring Station. You're declaring an emergency?"

  "Yes. A virus infected our primary systems and our automated workforce after Eden Fleet disabled our defences. We recently fended off some raiders and are currently under siege by a new, unknown threat. The ship's name is Triton."

  "That ship is wanted in connection with violations of several galactic laws. Are you being coerced in any way right now?"

  "No, I'm not being forced to communicate with you and no one's telling me what to say."

  "Are any of your defences online?"

  "No, Eden Fleet destroyed them before leaving. The obscuring field is up though, so we can't be scanned at long range."

  "Good. What is the condition of any product you have on hand?"

  "Always about the product. That's aaaaall the company cares about," Brad muttered as he leaned back in his seat.

  "We have enough to pay for repairs to the station and more. Can you send a ship?"

  "A rescue vessel and military escort was dispatched when your station management lost contact. They should arrive shortly."