The Memnon Incident: Part 1 of 4 (A Serial Novel)

by Marc DeSantis

  "That is what we all have been thinking," More said. "Her names was - is - Morrigan." She is bigger than any ship we currently have. It's a fitting name. You'll see when you get close, she is a little over five kilometers long. We have been extracting bits and pieces where we could. Several of the auxiliary reactors are still online after fifty millenia, supplying power to internal grav and life support. One maneuver drive is undamaged, but the great prizes are the displacement field generator along with the primary powerplant. We have found them, that was not too hard, but we can't get either to function, and we don't want to blow the whole ship to atoms. That wouldn't do at all." He smiled. "We have developed several ideas we wanted to try, but if anything goes wrong, and we release a burst of energy, hunting ships will be on us. We can't let them get our hands on such a prize. We would destroy it first." More said. "That would be a great loss."

  "So you need me to set this right? You have much confidence in me, Andrew."

  "You have worked on ancient ships before. There is the Lady of the Lake, and there was the Cordelia before her." The Cordelia was a relic from the Third Empire, a wonderful vessel that shamed almost all others in the Republic of Halifax Navy. She was small, only about the size of destroyer, but she was every bit as capable as a modern capital ship four times her size. The Lady of the Lake was a true battleship, but she was only nine thousand years old, a vessel of the later and less sophisticated Fourth Empire. The Morrigan was vastly more ancient.

  The enormity of the task ahead of Julius finally sank in. He had been so taken with the thought of setting foot on a piece of spaceborne antiquakraft that he had not considered that understanding it might be beyond him. Despite Gates' warning he had already let the honor of the Navy's summons go to his head. "This is much bigger than anything else I've seen," he said. "Do we even know how the plant operates?"

  More smiled. "That is, among many other things, what we need you to find out."

  Chapter Eight

  RHS Steadfast, Memnon system

  Tractoring a stricken warship was a difficult business under any circumstances. Maneuvering a stricken warship by tractor field out of a swarm of ready-to-blow nuclear mines was more difficult by many orders of magnitude. Mines were comparatively simple weapons rigged to detonate when the gravimetric field sensor inside the device detected a local distortion created by a passing ship that failed its friend or foe identification scan.

  It would have been a court-martial level infraction of all standing orders for Captain More to deliberately take Steadfast back inside a minecloud had his ship not been outfitted with the most advanced spoofing gear yet installed on a Republic ship. The trillion obol Golden Lion was too valuable to leave behind to be scavenged by the Memnonians, who might stumble upon it one day, and destroying it would have alerted the enemy to the presence of at least one surviving Halifaxian vessel.

  At root, Memnon's IFF protocols were very much like those used by the Republic's navy, since Halifax had been sharing weapons technology with her supposed ally for several decades. Halifax's engineers had broken the encryption utilized by Memnon's IFF, and were certain that they could fool her IFF scanners, thereby preventing automated attacks by its weaponry. More's original mission had been to make a high-speed approach past one of Memnon's remote, automated defense forts in the outer reaches of its system. With shields at maximum, even if the new equipment had failed, Steadfast could have absorbed the attack and continued on.

  But the mines had blown so soon after displacement reentry by More's group that the spoofing gear had not had the chance to work its magic, and with shields down, his squadron's ships had been sitting ducks. Over the course of two hours, Steadfast pulled the stricken Golden Lion clear of the mines, the onboard sensors of the weapons registering only that friendly ships were passing nearby, and their attack protocols were not initiated. A small cheer went up from the bridge crew on Steadfast as Golden Lion left the last of the mines behind.

  One problem gone, but there were still so many more left to be solved. It had been a little over four weeks since the ambush, and More was left wondering how long he could remain hidden in the distant regions of the Memnon system. Patrols this far out were rare, maybe nonexistent, but someone had laid the mines, and was probably still around. Yet they had failed to show themselves, and had seemed remarkably uncurious as to what their handiwork had achieved. More had expected some hounds to come sniffing to check out the scene, but there had been no visitors that Steadfast, Kongo, or Cormorant could detect.

  That made him conclude that Memnon had not been behind the ambush after all. If it had been, then the whole of the Memnonian navy would have descended on the area within hours of their displacement. Instead, there had been nothing. Close observation of the mines and the ability of the IFF spoofers to do their jobs showed that they were of Memnonian manufacture. It shouldn't have been that easy to acquire Memnonian nukes in the interstellar arms market, and the number of them was huge. Yet someone somewhere had built up a big supply of them. Could they be fakes meant to look like Memnon's products to implicate King Maurice?

  There was an indication of another hand at work here. Whomever had laid the mines had used its intel as to the strike group's reentry coordinates to lay the mines with pinpoint precision right where More's ships would emerge. There had been a leak. most likely, but what if there had not been a breach of security? If there was no leak, then the feat had to have been achieved via technical means. What kind of technology would enable a displacing ship's destination to be plotted with such mindbending accuracy? There was nothing that advanced in the Republic's arsenal, and More had access to all of the best equipment that Halifaxian naval engineers could produce. If somebody had something better, then where were they right now? Why would they go to all that trouble of preparing an ambush in someone else's system, at great distance from home, and then forget about it? If they had once been here, and then left, they must have been spooked by something. Something that would have made them depart in a hurry and dare not return.

  More looked at the reports sent in by his study teams on Morrigan. Dr. Venn had found what appeared to be a full body medtank that could heal wounds and possibly even regenerate limbs. Chief Engineering Officer Lieutenant Commander Boris Koslov had found that Morrigan's undamaged maneuver drive unit was fully functional, despite fifty millennia of dormancy. Power output was estimated to be twenty times that of a drive of the same size using current tech. No one made a drive that big anymore. That would change soon.

  The bridge of the ship had been badly hit in whatever catastrophe had engulfed Morrigan. The shipbrain was dead, and the technology that had gone into its manufacture was so far ahead of modern science that it was hard for anyone to determine where to begin to attempt a fix. That could wait, for now.

  More was most interested in the report submitted by his cousin. Julius had spent three days poking around the displacement field generator and the ship's primary powerplant. The generator was big, and hooked directly to the plant. Trouble was, the plant was just an empty sphere five meters in diameter studded with cables and access hatches. There was no control interface, no monitoring equipment, and no obvious means to turn the device on. However it worked, it had to be capable of generating enormous power, since the ship it moved was so massive, an estimated seventeen million tons. The recovery operation would all be a bitter disappointment if power could not be restored so that the displacement generator could be returned to operation. Without an operational FTL drive, Morrigan would never make it back to Halifax, and it would be a crying shame to have to destroy the ship to keep it out of anyone else's hands.

  If he could have trusted King Maurice, he might have called in help from Memnon, but the Republic's relations with the kingdom had become strained in recent years. After decades of alliance, Maurice had adopted a more equivocal stance between Halifax and the rising power of the Monarchonate. Tartarus wasn't shy about selling arms at cut rate prices to peripheral powers in the Great S
phere. It bought friendship, or at the very least influence, and Memnon had slowly been pulled out of the Republic's orbit. That deterioration was what had prompted the mission to test the spoofing gear, just in case it ever became necessary to shoot at Memnonian spacecraft.

  One scenario kept coming again and again to More's mind. Perhaps it had been Tartarus behind the operation, but it had been kept hidden from Maurice. If his squadron had been destroyed in Memnonian space, with no survivors, as had clearly been planned, then perhaps the Tartareans hoped to implicate Maurice, and expose him to retribution from an enraged Halifax. Who would believe him when he denied involvement in an attack within his own borders? The rules governing an intrusion by supposedly friendly ships within claimed space were fuzzy, but attacking and destroying them was out of bounds. An interception accompanied by a firm demand to depart was the norm, particularly when transiting through the furthest boundary of a system well away from the inner planets. No one would have suspected that More's ships had been hit by mines immediately after displacing. It was just not technically feasible to be that precise, or so More and everyone else would have thought one month ago. So with a Republican squadron blown to molecular dust and Maurice looking guilty, and needing friends, he would most likely turn to Tartarus for protection.

  So what might Tartarus hope to gain from a Memnon in need of protection? A new client state would be a diplomatic triumph. With Memnon brought into the fold, the Monarchonate could present itself once again as the wave of the future, with the tide of history behind it. In practical terms, there would be the matter of basing rights for Tartarean warships in the Memnon system. The Armada of Tartarus would be advanced several light years closer to Halifax's frontier.

  It was a dangerous gamble. It would defy all logic for Maurice to have approved of a scheme to take down Republican ships inside his own system. So, if Tartarus was involved, it had to be conducting this operation on its own, trusting to the distance from the inhabited planets of the the Memnon system to hide what they were doing. The Sphinx was a cunning player, but if the gambit failed, and his part in it was discovered, he would have had a war on his hands with an enemy that was, by all relevant measure, more powerful than he was.

  Something was wrong with the picture that More was drawing. Things didn't add up. That was to be expected when information was incomplete, an elementary lesson taught to all first years at the Academy at Cold Bay. Time might add missing pieces of the puzzle, and give him a clearer idea of what was going on. For now, he could only surmise that he was a piece in a much larger game.

  Chapter Nine

  Morrigan, Memnon system

  The assault boat pilot guided the small craft carefully toward the Morrigan, his fingers lightly tapping the controls as it came to alight in one of the many docking bays inside the great ship. Jenkins had been aboard her many times since its discovery, but had not gotten used to the sheer size of the vessel. It was about twice as large as the Navy's biggest battleships, and was larger even than the Lady of the Lake, the grandest ship he had ever seen before Morrigan. Her hull was a bright gray-white, with gold striping running the length of her hull from bow to stern. That she was a warship was obvious, turrets and gun emplacements studded the surface of her hull, though they seemed to be smaller, and less brutish in appearance, than weaponry found on modern fighting ships.

  The boat settled on the bay deck, emitting a hiss of venting steam as the landing struts deployed. Jenkins led his squad out of the rear hatch. His seven marines, clad head to foot in their M74 battle armor, trod heavily down the gangway behind him. He was greeted by a slender man, an officer from the Steadfast by the name of Chandler. He was in tech intel, Jenkins, recalled. He looked annoying. Jenkins would try to keep this conversation short.

  "Thank you for coming, Lieutenant Jenkins," Chandler said with a smile.

  "It's our job," Jenkins replied.

  Chandler wrinkled his nose. "Yes, I suppose it is." Marines were always so straightforward.

  "You said you had a situation."

  "Of course, yes, we do." Chandler tapped his wristcomp. "I am sending you the coordinates and other information now. We found a part of the ship, in the forward section, that has been secured against entry. There are life signs on the other side, but they aren't ours, and they are not responding to our attempts to communicate."

  Jenkins checked the readings. "The life signs are faint," he said. "Could they be original crew in cryostasis?"

  Chandler shook his head. "I don't know. That's a good guess. Then again, we don't know if they kept their people in cryostasis at all. We haven't found anything that looks like what we use for the purpose. Anyway, if there are people in there, and they were awake, we should have found more robust signatures. We don't know what's on the other side, so we might be getting interference from some of the more exotic systems on Morrigan."

  Jenkins shrugged. It was an innocent gesture, but in battle armor it appeared full of menace.

  "We'll know soon enough."

  "Could this get ugly?" Chandler asked. "I mean, could this turn into a shootout?"

  Sergeant Cone was beside Jenkins and laughed. "We can only hope so."

  "Don't worry about this, lieutenant," Jenkins soothed. "We'll take care of it. If there is a mess, you'll only have to tidy up after us."

  Chandler counted to three. Marines were always so full of themselves. "Be my guest then," he said.

  Without a glance backward, Jenkins, Cone, and the rest of the marines in the squad clomped off.

  Chandler went back to sifting technical data that had been pouring in from the exploratory teams on Morrigan.

  Jenkins' squad arrived at the sealed-off portal after twenty minutes of trudging through the darkened corridors of the ship. At all times he and the marines of his small command were impressed by the workmanship of the vessel and the myriad commendable features they passed along the way. For one thing, the passageways lacked the cramped, claustrophobic feel of modern-day naval warships. The corridors were wide, and the ceilings high. Though the bulkhead doors had been closed for millennia, they opened easily and were operated in much the same manner as doors found on ordinary spacecraft. Every now and then they would come upon a holographic vidscreen that would spring to life, delivering a recorded greeting in an archaic tongue.

  At last, they reached the impassable section. It had been hastily welded shut. There had been little effort made hide the work. Whatever was on the other side had either not expected to be found, or perhaps wanted to keep something penned in.

  "Macho bravado aside, lieutenant," Sergeant Cone asked, "what if we should leave well enough alone?" He nodded toward the sealed door. Maybe something is in there that shouldn't be found?"

  "Like what?"

  "Who knows? But after fifty thousand years? Maybe crew from the Time Before."

  "Don't go introspective on me now," Jenkins said. "We've got a job to do. Marines kill things. We are marines. If we find something we don't like we will shoot it to pieces until it is very dead."

  "I'm glad I brought my rifle."

  "Me too." Jenkins patted the door. "Are you ready or would you like an invitation?"

  "No invitations please, sergeant," piped up Corporal Javier Sung, a strapping fellow from Tenarife on Halifax. "We're not getting any younger."

  Jenkins could almost see the smirk that Sung was wearing behind his helmet. "Let's not keep the kids waiting," he said to Corporal Wilkes. Wilkes rarely spoke. He was a demolitions specialist. He let his explosives do much of his talking for him.

  "Got it." Wilkes advanced and placed several grams of shaped-charge magnapex along the weld-lines.

  "Fire in the hole!"

  The door blew inward and clanged onto the floor beyond. "By two!" Jenkins barked.

  Cone and Sung went in first, followed by Private Gordon Brand and Wilkes. Behind them were Privates Desmond Fuji and Simon Cass, with Private Waldo Tikhonov and Jenkins himself taking up the rear. The marines' battle armo
r filtered out all toxic gases, but it did allow the passage of non-toxic odors, the reason being that the marines needed access to as much information as possible in a combat environment, and the sense of smell was of extreme value. It wouldn't do to have a squad of highly-trained and expensively-equipped superkillers tramping ignorantly through a pool of leaking petrol or entering a confined space suffused with explosive gases.

  Right now, what they smelled was neither petrol nor flammable gas, but the human stink of men living in a confined space for days on end with no place to get rid of their waste. "This place reeks," said Brand, sniffing so loudly he could be heard clearly over the squad comchannel. "This is worse than the lavatory at Camp Wyatt.

  "I didn't think that was possible," Fuji said, "but it is. What the hell happened . . ."

  Fuji never finished his sentence. There was a flash of light, and trail of white smoke, and a hole appeared in his chest, followed by a spray of blood and liquified vertebrae. He collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  "Shooters! Up top! 2 o'clock!" Brand raised his M22 and let out a stream of hypersonic, electromagnetically-accelerated pellets at three figures crouching behind an improvised barrier of metal plates and torn-out consoles. The pellets tore through the barrier, scything through the men beyond. A spray of blood and flesh burst from the their position as the proximity-fused projectiles detonated inside their bodies.

  The hostiles had anticipated meeting up with power-armored soldiers, Jenkins knew. This had to be an enemy from their own era, not the awakened remnant of the marooned-in-time crew of Morrigan. They could not be ordinary space pirates either. Those didn't carry shoulder-fired rocket launchers armed with shaped-charge munitions. These were military types. Poor Fuji.

  Several more hostiles appeared in the corridor ahead. Jenkins' armor's IFF identified them as Tartarean ashigaru armed with gauss rifles and a rocket launcher of the type that had slain Fuji. The ashigaru were similar to Republican marines, heavily-armed, well-trained, and encased in formidable Charon-model power armor. Jenkins switched the ammo feed of his gauss rifle from pellets to solid, kinetic energy penetrators. A KEP was mostly like an old-fashioned bullet, but composed of a superdense tungsten-osmium-iridium alloy. He unleashed a three-round burst downrange, striking one of the ashigaru directly in the faceplate of his helmet. The helmet, and the head within it, disintegrated, leaving behind a corpse that ran forward two more steps and then fell to the floor, streaming blood.