“Excellent shot,” Gil congratulated.
“Thanks, captain,” Lt. McBride replied, though her usually inexpressive face slumped. “At least we won’t go out alone.”
“That was never the case, lieutenant,” Gil said. “Each of us has the other four, don’t we?” He offered a small grin as he turned to face his crew. Instead of watching him, their eyes were glued to the glass behind him, and the two remaining ships as they swiveled in position to aim their cannons, already loading with fresh plasma rounds. The one that had blocked the rear was nearly ready.
“Bring defense back up?” Lt. Mills asked.
“Hell no,” Lt. Lucas replied. “What do you say, captain? Gun it, yeah?”
“We’ve tipped that hand,” Gil said, “but you have to play the hand you’re dealt, don’t you?” He nodded at Lt. Lucas, who took maniacally to his controls. The crew again secured themselves in their seats as the ship lurched into quick motion, dodging another round of cannon fire, this time from both remaining ships. One round narrowly missed, skimming just above, rocking the ship as it grazed the shield. It was enough to unbalance Lt. Lucas’s trajectory, sending the ship into a spiral.
“Damn it all to Venbal,” Lt. McCarthy cursed.
“Going for a ride,” Gil commented as the ship’s chaotic motions sent all of them from one edge of their seat to another, the gravity generator keeping their butts down, but the rest of them rolling about in their chairs.
“Lt. McBride, any shot?” Gil asked.
Without reply, Lt. McBride took to the rear gun once more, watching as the two triangles came in and out of view while the ship spun forward between them. Likewise, Gil watched their looming metal bodies pass once above through the glass, then once below, and once again coming in from the left towards the right. He had no bearing on the ship’s trajectory, but despite his dizziness, called back to Lt. Lucas, “You’ve some notion of straight, yes?”
“Working on it,” Lt. Lucas replied through gritted teeth, struggling to true their trajectory.
“Captain, their third volley is impending, we need to raise the shields,” Lt. Mills urged.
“What do you say, Sheri?” Gil called back to Lt. McBride.
She lowered the gun’s display and brought back the cannons. She focused their sights on the moving target of the left pirate ship, which in a matter of seconds became the right pirate ship, then the top. There it seemed to rest as Lt. Lucas managed to settle the ship’s direction on sideways, facing the two pirate ships as they appeared sideways to them, and one atop the other. It was an awful way to take aim, Gil thought, but if anyone could manage, it would be Sheri McBride.
“I’ve got it,” she declared.
“Well, have at, lieutenant,” Gil authorized.
Sheri fired, and two rounds left the cannons beneath the nose of Berserker One, gliding out from beneath them, shrinking as they crossed the divide between them and the pirate ships. The first, leading by only half a second, managed a direct hit straight into the nose of the bottom ship, bursting against its shield and rippling out along the body, but only along the surface of the blue protective sheath. The second slipped between the two ships, a miss.
“Damn,” Lt. Lucas cursed, calming down from his intensive navigation in the preceding minutes. He swiped his thinning blonde hair across his scalp, the sweat holding it together in one thick clump that ran from the top of his forehead to the top of his neck.
Gil repeated the motion with his own hand, pressing his sweat soaked bangs back into the rest of his salt and pepper locks. He watched through the glass at the second round as it shrank into the distance. Then it collided with something far out, bursting into a bright display of orange and red fire before giving the stage back to the black of space.
“What was that?” Lt. Mills questioned.
“Nav shows several more bodies approaching,” Lt. Lucas reported.
“Belt Buccaneers don’t take kindly to loss,” Lt. McCarthy informed. “These are undoubtedly reinforcements, Captain. And likely to triple the original force.”
“Ian,” Gil turned to Lt. Lucas, “is there nothing in the surrounding space permitting a warphole?”
Ian Lucas took a deep breath in through his nose and released it through pursed lips. “The only spacefabric susceptible to the kind of manipulation needed for a warphole rests precisely where the obstruction lies. It’s like it knows the potential of that space, and it’s stretched itself across. Like some damn massive…” no words available to mind adequately completed the thought.
“Conscious space blanket,” Olivia McCarthy took a stab. Ian nodded.
Cameron Mills rubbed his eyes beneath his glasses. “It truly, completely, wholly makes absolutely no sense, Captain.”
Gil nodded. “Eight lovely pirate triangles descending on one rickety old Berserker backed into a corner,” Gil summed up. The crew turned to Gil, awaiting instruction. Despite the odds, ever worsening, they remained fiercely loyal and willing to obey their captain’s command.
The unfortunate truth was Gil was out of commands for this situation.
He opened his mouth, hoping by the time the silence became awkward he would have something to offer, but instead something else happened. Nothing.
Three.
An Investigation
____________________________
He looked behind him into the surrounding space where the veritable fleet of pirate ships collected, along with the floating wreckage of the one defeated. They collected like a swarm, but only held their position.
“What are they doing?” Lt. McCarthy questioned.
“Well, if you don’t know, I don’t suppose any of us do,” Gil answered. “You don’t know of this tactic?”
She shook her head. “Never. They’re big on warfare, light on diplomacy, and lighter on thinking. Whatever they’re doing, it’s unprecedented.”
“Just collecting like that,” Lt. Lucas muttered, staring at them all. And they had continued to collect, first the six, then another seven, and a trickling in of tens more, filling the space at the edge of the asteroid belt.
“Goodness,” Gil commented, struggling to keep count.
“Should we be shaking in our boots, or praying right now?” Lt. McBride spoke.
“What do you say, Lt. McCarthy? What god is responsible for this?”
“Pirates have no god but booty,” she answered. “I really couldn’t wager a guess as to what’s collecting them.”
The pirate ships, stacked high and collected deep, began to ignite their thrusters. In unorganized waves, they jettisoned themselves forward, out past the edge of the asteroid field and into the depths of space. Wave after wave, the Belt Buccaneers fled their home. The crew aboard Berserker One watched with astonishment. The metallic, triangular bodies drifted past without a second thought. Several flew above, several more below, soaring at greater and greater speeds. Gil watched their thrusters, telling by their colors that they were being pushed to their brinks. All energy force was being siphoned from other systems to focus on the forward propulsion of the ship, nearly disregarding the position of each within the greater cluster, some coming very near to collision, though narrowly missing. Like a frightened pack of prey wary of a nearing predator, they took flight. The comparison caused a shiver to race through Captain Gil Graves’s bum leg for the consideration of some unknown space predator in their midst.
“You’re not going to believe this, Captain,” Lt. Mills piped up, breaking the silence that had descended on the bridge. Their collective heads turned to the thin body of Cameron Mills, now confidently, almost excitedly sitting up in his chair. “The aberration, it’s gone.”
Lt. Ian Lucas turned away from Cameron towards his own console with astonishment, verifying his fellow lieutenant’s claim. “He’s right,” he said, aghast. “The spacefabric is clear for a warphole. We’re clear.”
“Certain death has run off and our once obstructed path home has suddenly opened back up.” Gil mulled t
he facts with incredulity. He caught the striking green gaze of Lt. Sheri McBride, who, too, was less than excited at their apparent good luck, staring back with concern. “Fishy, me thinks,” he spoke directly to her. She responded with an assured nod. Gil turned back to Lt. Ian Lucas. “Let’s do a thorough scan of the area, check behind all the asteroids, let’s move the ship if we need a better look. If there’s anything out there, I want to know about it before it knows about me.”
“Sure thing, Captain,” Lt. Lucas replied. He scanned the space around the prospective warphole location, where once he had seen a massive black obstruction blocking their pathway back to the fleet. Floating above his console, a series of asteroids panned by his vision, his eyes carefully studying the information that appeared scrolling beneath them. A floating lens manipulated by his fingers zoomed into the nooks and crannies between floating rocks, discovering either empty pockets or smaller rocks. It was conspicuously quiet.
“Show me the susceptible space pocket, lieutenant,” Gil commanded. He swiveled back around in his chair, and before the wide glass window a blue square appeared, first small, then increasing to provide an in-depth picture of the space pocket. It was merely more black, with a few glowing dots, dim in its backdrop, distant stars. Despite being so empty, there was a physics anomaly taking place in the black section of spacefabric. Though they couldn’t see with their bare eyes, they all knew certain conditions were present there, traits to the very nature of existence that conspired against the rules. Captain Gil Graves was always astonished by the creation of warpholes, the idea a man made ship could prod the blanket of space to pierce through to another point farther in the fabric. Like ordered chaos, determined, and yet blind. Just how he felt in the moment. Completely blind.
“Wait, what’s that?” questioned Lt. Mills, squinting at the display through his bifocals.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Gil asked.
Lt. Mills accessed the display to focus on a small object at the center of the zoomed window. There, suddenly present for all to see, was a large, oblong object. As Gil strained his eyes to observe its small visage, he saw a pair of large thrusters at its rear, a massive fuel cell hold in its underbelly, and a hint of a nose at its head. It was a ship.
“A cargo ship,” Lt. McCarthy specified. “What is it doing out here?”
Gil already knew the answer was nothing. A grim mission in death, to wander aimlessly with all its passengers either long gone or long dead. The greater question was what had led it to one or the other.
“Do you suppose it created the obstruction?” questioned Lt. McBride.
“Not possible,” Lt. Mills answered, adjusting his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “There’s nothing that can fake an object to the size of what we saw.”
“Especially not an old junker like that,” Lt. McCarthy added. She drew back her frizzy red hair and wrapped it with a band behind her head. She rubbed her eyes, then continued to examine the cargo ship presented on the screen. “It’s a pre-IURF clunker. Once used by rim farmers to carry exotic crop into the galactic center.”
“Geesh,” Lt. Lucas commented. “Knowing when they were wiped out, that thing must be, one, two hundred--”
“And fifty three years old,” Lt. McCarthy completed. “At the youngest.”
“While we’re not far from the wasted farm planets, we’re not exactly close,” Lt. McBride commented. “So how is this possible?”
“It’s not,” Gil answered. “Which means, of course, we need to find out why, don’t we?”
The crew exchanged glances behind him in a pregnant silence that proceeded until Alexander marched through their center and meowed ostentatiously before leaping into Gil’s lap. He pressed his nose affectionately against Gil’s cheek as the captain stroked his back.
“Alexander seems to think so,” Olivia McCarthy said. “The Ecept civilization followed their cat’s advice. They lasted for a thousand years.”
“So shall we, then,” said Captain Graves, scratching the underside of Alexander’s chin as the cat purred beneath him. “You’d better not be wrong,” Gil added in a whisper to the feline’s perked ear. “Lt. Lucas,” Gil spoke loudly again, calling forth his captain’s voice to stroke confidence in his wary crew. “Take us in.”
“On it, Cap,” Ian Lucas replied, controlling the ship’s thrusters towards the pocket of space located beneath the asteroid belt and near its edge, some one hundred miles from Berserker One’s position after the abruptly finished pirate skirmish. Without friction in the vacuum of space, they were able to accelerate and close the distance to within a quarter mile in a matter of minutes, spent quiet and thoughtful, each watching as the object slowly came into perspective. As it did, Lt. Lucas laid on the reverse thrusters to produce drag, slipping into a gentle glide as Berserker One came to inch towards the docking bay of the old transport.
“There,” Lt. McCarthy pointed. Her finger extended towards a protruding box at the rear of the body, appearing like a bloated, beached whale in Gil’s eyes. She was signalling to Lt. Lucas where to navigate Berserker One’s docking bay. As Lt. Lucas twisted the ship to align the two ports, the crew watched the lifeless cargo ship carefully. Gil felt as though they expected it at any moment to lurch into motion, or expose secret canons, or expel some wild creature. As he considered the ridiculous scenarios, he caught himself staring harder into the cargo ship’s windows than he had before. He chuckled at himself, though some nefarious thought lingered, wondering what they might encounter.
“Three...two…” Lt. Lucas counted down in their approach. Berserker One’s docking bay extended, a smaller box to be fitted to the inside of the cargo vessel. As it entered, like all spaceships, the receiving dock automatically secured latches and began producing a mirror air density and composition to match Berserker One. Gil watched as the the analysis between the two ships presented itself across the front glass of the bridge. It revealed that the ancient vessel still retained working systems. There would be air, and it would be breathable. He furrowed his brow and peered past the figures at the underbelly of the massive cargo ship, as if questioning it with his eyes. It didn’t seem so absurd in the moment, considering it now showed signs of life.
“That’s impossible,” Lt. McBride commented as she read the figures. She turned to her fellow lieutenant, Cameron Mills, seated to her left. “Can that be?”
He merely turned back to her, his wide eyes appearing enlarged behind the thick glass of his bifocals, and shrugged.
Sheri McBride leaned back in her chair, allowing herself to slump in a rare break in posture. She pulled out the band constricting her hair into a ponytail and permitted its jet black, straight strands to dangle around her face. She scratched at her scalp, took a deep breath, and released it in a sigh. She then straightened her back, pulled her hair again into a tight pony and fastened it with the band. After her readjustment, she addressed Gil, “Captain, I have to be candid with you here.”
“Please,” Gil replied, offering his hand in the space between them, as though inviting her to take the stage. “It’s all I ever want.”
She grinned a moment for his own relentless candor, for which she had a begrudging appreciation, then proceeded, “This reads like a trap from every angle. In the wake of our only anticipated threat fleeing the area, a single cargo ship appears, lifeless, and from a bygone era. Nothing could seem more innocuous, and yet, for that very reason, I hold my suspicions.”
“Duly noted, lieutenant,” Gil replied. “I couldn’t agree more.”
Lt. McBride released a breath and her tension floated off with it.
“Which is precisely why we need to embark,” Gil added.
Lt. McBride forced herself not to groan, but couldn’t keep from gritting her teeth, her jaw flexing, a bit of muscle showing in her cheek which Gil took notice of and smiled at. She would follow him, he knew, if it meant flying into hell to strike the Devil. But she would also have to grumble within herself to do it. He thought a moment
about her discharge, and wanted then, like so many other instances, to know. He stared into her eyes, as if to read the memory. Though, as he read her gaze, understood she kept it locked in the back of her mind, where no person would ever be permitted. He took a moment to silently admire her control before standing from his captain’s chair. He stretched his back, laid into his left leg to get the pain over with, then took a deep breath. “This oddity is exactly the sort of thing Berserker One was meant for, my plucky crew of misfits. Though I wouldn’t suggest any of us leave this ship without some protection.”
“Guns,” Lt. Sheri McBride specified. “The big ones.”
On the other side of the semicircle, Lt. Olivia McCarthy cringed. “Let’s hope we don’t have a need for them.”
“Exploration sometimes incurs a few battles,” Lt. Ian Lucas commented. Olivia shook her head. “We’ll be just fine, I assume,” he tried his best to assuage her fears.
“So, it’ll be an investigation, then,” Lt. Cameron Mills said.
“And hopefully not much more,” Captain Gil Graves replied.
Four.
Echoes in Time
____________________________
Captain Gil Graves marched along the metal flooring as it sloped down from Berserker One into the as of yet unnamed cargo ship, the pain of his left leg easing with each passing stride. He knew he had to keep walking to keep the pain at bay, which meant a steady pace into the belly of the mysterious vessel without hesitation. He hoped his crew would be as willing. He turned his chin to his shoulder, observing them in the periphery of his left eye, the four of them grouped into formation, large blasters at the ready. Sheri McBride kept the lead, a mere pace behind Gil, and a step to his right, the one who could most confidently brandish her weapon. She caught his eye and nodded with a stern face.
Fallen Fleet (Berserker One Book 1) Page 2