Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine

by Luke Sky Wachter

  For nearly half a minute nothing happened and then skeletal figures with built-in weapons in their arms began pouring out of the twelve sided vessel before making a bee line for the airlocks.

  **************************************************

  A data slate chimed an odd, blatting tone.

  Lancer Captain Darius’s head snapped down and he stared at his screen, tapping away on the slate before his head snapped back up.

  “The intrusion alarms on the starboard rear, 19G airlock has just been disabled,” he reported in a tense voice.

  It took Akantha all of half a second to recognize the implications. They had just been boarded!

  “Prepare yourselves, men,” she shouted, lunging to her feet.

  “To battle!” cried Captain Atticus. “The streets shall flow with the blood of the opposers,” he declared, thrusting his hands up above his head, creating an odd ‘Y’ shape as his armor prevented his upper arms from rising higher than a plane parallel to the ground.

  Akantha turned and blinked. “They have halls and corridors but no streets here,” she reminded him.

  Atticus didn’t even have the grace to blush or look in any way shame-faced, instead he grinned and motioned eagerly toward the hatch.

  Not feeling in the least bit ready to drag things out, Akantha suppressed an eager smile of her own and at the head of the ship’s warrior contingent lead the charge toward airlock 19G.

  They knew when they had gotten close, because a distinctive scream met their ears which signaled an air pressure leak.

  “Make sure to secure your helmets so you can breathe,” Akantha said lowering and sealing the visor on hers before drawing her Bandersnatch and charging forward. “Fan out and follow me!” she shouted.

  Metal boots thudded as a long line of eager warriors chased her down the hall, each one eager to be the first, or possibly the second to come to grips with the foe, as their Hold Mistress was firmly in the lead and no one was brave enough, stupid enough, or disrespectful enough to try brushing past her.

  “Help!” screamed someone before his voice ended in the sound of blaster fire and a wet, gurgling sound.

  This was followed by a very girlish sounding shriek.

  Akantha rounded the corner to see a gaunt, skeletal-looking, demonic-looking figure with blaster barrels where a person’s hands would normally go.

  She shook her head at the strangeness of it all. Normally she hardly noticed many of the differences between her people and the Starborn any more, but this was particularly jarring. Even though it looked nothing like a skeleton, the moment she laid eyes on this metal, ‘droid’ person, that was the first thing that popped into her mind: this is a walking pile of metal bones.

  With mechanical precision, the droid’s head turned toward her and shortly after its head turned, its torso—and gun arms—did likewise.

  “For the Hold!” she shouted, drawing back her sword and charging.

  “Messene!” roared the majority of Lancers following her.

  A few instead called out, “The Phoenix!" But they were few, and mostly lacked her native accent.

  Blaster bolts slammed into her armor and ricocheted off. The droid warrior firing those bolts in a steady stream alternated shots with one arm and then the other.

  Then she was within range. Her sword swept forward and the droid moved to block with one of its gun arms.

  Bandersnatch cut deep and something within the arm exploded, showering Akantha with duralloy shards and sending the Droid reeling back most of its arm below the elbow gone.

  Past the damaged droid she could see several other droids. One of them gunned down a pair of running Damage Control Ratings, shooting them in the back. A second was in close quarters combat with an overweight engineer, who was wielding a pair of oversized auto-wrenches like they were clubs as he desperately attempted to keep the droids gun arms from gunning him down.

  Then a stream of Tracto-an warriors were pushing their past her on either side, and before she could finish off her kill some random Lancer stuck his the barrel of his blaster rifle against the head of the damaged droid and pulled the trigger. He then continued on by, blending into the scene ahead before she could see who had stolen her glory.

  Like a puppet with its strings cut, the droid collapsed onto the deck.

  “Who took my kill?!” she shouted with outrage, but whoever it was had moved well past her and no one was fool enough to own up to it.

  Blasters fired and vibro-swords slashed, chopped and stabbed. Within two minutes the last of the droids was backing away with one of its arms damaged while the other was shooting for all the thing was worth.

  Then, all at once, it was over when a pair of well-placed shots tore the creature’s body apart.

  “Body count!” called out Atticus, and it turned out that none of her warriors had fallen while we had accounted for eight of the enemy warrior droids.

  “Make sure we got them all and then scour the ship for more intruders,” Akantha ordered Atticus.

  “Yes, Hold Mistress,” the Lancer Captain said bracing to attention.

  She looked around before spotting Darius.

  “Yes, my Lady?” the other Captain asked.

  “Gather some men; we are going to airlock 19G. I want to make sure there are no more intruders on my ship!” she said, eager at the thought of further combat.

  She could only hope there were more boarding ships and more droids running around to fight and without a better idea,

  the airlock seemed to offer the best chance at combat.

  “Right away, my Lady!” the Lyconese man said, sounding surprised she had chosen him and acting appropriately eager to please the Hold Mistress.

  Chapter 53: Feel the Burn

  “Murphy’s name,” I swore as we continued to inch along, all the while getting hammered by laser blasts. The ejected core from Longshot had wiped out a number of boats giving us a temporary reprieve, but more kept on coming, “somebody had better turn up the throttle and get us some more speed or I’m going to start shooting people until I find someone who can!”

  “I’m still throttled down!” screamed DuPont, slapping his hands palm down on his touch screen right before kicking his console, “shooting me won’t help; this is all Engineering.”

  “Miss Blythe,” I snapped, “you tell the Chief Engineer down there that my next call is going to be to the Lancers!”

  She tapped her ear bud obviously receiving a message of some kind.

  “Yes!” exclaimed the Helmsman, moments before grabbing his console.

  My head whipped around. On the screen, the Phoenix fishtailed around as the Port Secondary lit back up. I could see DuPont’s body leaning as he tapped on his console, trying to get the ship back under control.

  “Primary Engine back at 100% burn and the port secondary just went live,” shouted DuPont.

  “Get us out of here, Helm,” I ordered unnecessarily.

  “Here we go,” DuPont declared excitedly, “port engine up to 75% and the Primary is at a hundred and ten!”

  “Bucking cables are under strain, but holding,” said crewwoman Blythe.

  “Instruct the fleet to keep pace!” I ordered Steiner.

  “Shields collapsed; starboard generators shutting down to prevent overload,” reported Longbottom.

  “We’re taking multiple strikes to our stern,” reported Tactical.

  “The Fleet acknowledges orders and report happy to comply,” said the little com-tech.

  “Primary Engine is redlining; the port secondary is going critical!” shouted DuPont.

  “Breaking contact with the gunboats,” Tactical reported loudly, “take that, you twelve-sided blighters!”

  “Just a little longer,” I muttered, staring at the screen and our pursuers so hard I was afraid my eyes would burst.

  The ship shuddered briefly. “We just lost the portside engine,” DuPont said as he went white-faced.

  Our speed dropped but we were still outside r
ange of the light lasers and continuing to pull away.

  “We just lost the port engine,” the Damage Control watch stander reported before she began issuing orders to her teams. “Damage control teams are to report to the aft spaces of the ship to help contain internal fires.”

  “What?!” I snapped turning to her but she continued to ignore anything but her job.

  “Internal blast-doors have been activated, and compromised areas are—or have been—vented into space.

  However, there are several crawls spaces showing up on my sensors as still active—“ she said, continuing to allocate resources.

  “As soon as you can, Mr. DuPont,” Captain Laurent said heavily, “I want you to start throttling back down on our primary engine. We wouldn’t want to be left stranded in space without a working engine.”

  DuPont blinked and relaxed his death grip on his touch screen and took a slow shallow breath. “Yes, sir,” he replied.

  “Good,” the Captain said tightly.

  Tense minutes passed as the Strike Cruiser slowed and slowed again until the Phoenix wasn’t moving any faster than the droids that were following them.

  Finally the report came in. “The Damage control team out on the hull reports they have bypassed the faulty lines and are ready to check their work by opening back up the valves on the formerly damaged lines,” reported Blythe.

  Laurent and I shared a mutually discomforted look. “Proceed,” the Captain replied.

  Moments later, DuPont stiffened in his chair.

  “Heat readings from the Primary Engine are…starting to slowly decrease,” he reported with a relieved look.

  “Excellent news,” I said with relief. If the engines went belly up there was nothing we could do. Then I stared at the screen, wondering what I was supposed to do next. We were alive and I hadn’t expected that—not at all. At least, not once we entered Aqua Nova’s planetary space and the droids reamed the local SDF.

  Speaking of which…

  “Whatever happened to those SDF boys?” I demanded, an hour into the chase as we circled around the planet and moon far enough out in an orbit that wouldn’t tempt the droids to firing their chemical weapons.

  “Still hiding behind the moon,” Laurent said promptly. “They’re careful to keep it so that they’ve always got the moon between them and the swarm,” he paused and then added reluctantly, “although they did make a pass through the remains of the mother-ship fleet and lased everything that moved until it didn’t.”

  “Cowards,” muttered DuPont.

  I gave the helmsman a hard look and then turned back to the captain. I wasn’t sure the helmsman was right, but then again I wasn’t sure he was wrong either. However, making that call was my job…at least when on the bridge. The peanut gallery could talk all they wanted on their own time—or when out of my sight.

  “Well, it’s not the bravest thing or most likely way of endearing themselves to us as allies,” I said after a moment’s contemplation. “On the other hand, trying to annihilate us with a bomb wave from their moon base pretty much poisoned that well as far as I’m concerned. So I can’t really blame them for not extending themselves toward making sure we survive.”

  “Well we did lead the droids directly into their fixed defenses, and when we got the droids to chase us around their home world the mechanicals dropped chemical weapons on some of their major cities,” Laurent pointed out.

  “We saved their world from invasion and subsequent orbital bombardment,” I said flatly. “Millions of citizens are alive and well because of us. Without us they would have lost this star system for sure. As such, I’m not that concerned with complaints…certainly not ones originating from the Aqua Nova government. I say, ‘with allies like these who needs enemies,’ eh?”

  Laurent twitched his shoulders and cocked his head. “Just playing devil’s advocate and pointing out what they’re either going to say or going to think,” he said, splaying his hands. “However, I think it’s safe to say that this system can’t be called ‘saved’ while there are still well over a thousand fighting gunboats still active inside her. Don’t you?”

  Behind my pleasant mask, I was gritting my teeth. “A definite point,” I admitted, “let’s revisit that particular subject as soon as we’ve dealt with the boats.”

  Laurent’s brows lifted, “You want us to go back after them, with only one working engine—an engine that has battlefield repairs to her name?”

  “I don’t see those SDF boys hiding behind the moon coming out to defend the helpless and deal with the droids,” I scoffed, casting a glowering look at the icons of the battleship and her three destroyer escorts, “but feel free to invite them to the party. In the meantime, Helm,” I said turning to DuPont, “please take us within range of our long range weaponry. Tactical,” I said turning to the head of that department, “why don’t we continue to thin the herd?”

  And for the next six plus hours, that’s exactly what we did. The droids followed and we shot at them from long range. The remains of the local system defense fleet, however, didn’t come out from behind their moon to help until the droid swarm had been significantly thinned and were down to less than a hundred gunboats.

  No amount of urging prompted them to come out of their nice, dark, hole.

  “A nice photo-op opportunity,” I said calmly as the heavily-damaged battleship came barreling out from behind the moon.

  “Projected course puts the Poseidon set to run right through the middle of the droids,” reported Shepherd.

  My mouth quirked but my eyes were daggers as I looked at the battleship. “The heavy lifting is over, boys and girls,” I said easily, “so now it’s time for them to come out and garner the glory of finishing off the droid fleet—delivering the death blow, as it were.

  “We could still turn back and annihilate the rest of the droids before that battleship gets here,” Laurent said looking appalled at the maneuver by the local SDF.

  “And have ourselves sitting there at low speeds with hot weapons and weakened shields, while the battleship of an untrustworthy ally—an ‘ally’ that’s already fired on us once—is making an attack run right smack dab in our direction?" I shook my head, “I’ll not risk the lives of a single one of this crew or, rather, member of this fleet over a PR stunt. Let them reap whatever reward they can from this fiasco,” I finished bitterly.

  “The battleship did try to tell the moon base to divert or self-destruct those weapons,” Laurent said after a pause, “they fought hard against those droids until their ship was almost done for, as well.”

  “And yet they still found it in them to sit safely behind that moon and let us deal with things while hundreds of gunboats were still running loose inside their home system,” I retorted, shaking my head in negation, “meaning either they don’t care what happens to us; think the risk of those gunboats finding some way to cause further trouble was low; or they take the self-serving orders of their government first and foremost. They may not have agreed with the attack on this ship, or it could have all been one elaborate ruse. Either way, they’ve shown that we, their erstwhile allies, take last priority in their queue.”

  “They are an SDF Fleet,” Laurent said with a wince, “and civilian control of the military is a right enshrined by many planetary cultures.”

  “Considering the demeanor of local civilian leadership, you are practically making my case for me,” I quipped, turning back to DuPont, “pull us away and let the battleship finish them off.”

  “Already doing that, Admiral,” the Helmsman said quickly.

  “Good man,” I said flatly.

  I and the rest of the bridge crew watched and stared as the SDF Battleship Poseidon and her heavily-scarred battle armor went smashing through the remaining droid gunboats like a vibro-blade through flesh. She left nothing but death, destruction, and shattered wreckage in her wake as every still-functioning weapon aboard her lanced through the enemy survivors until there were no more survivors.

  I
f there were any more droids active in the system at that point, I didn’t know about it. They either had to be in hiding, or else floating around in damaged and inactive ships.

  I stared at the screen in wonderment, all at once my eyelids feeling like sandpaper as they went down and then up again as I tried to blink away the tiredness that settled down on my weary body like a heavy, restrictive blanket.

  “Admiral,” Lisa Steiner over at Communications said, “I have a call coming in for you.”

  “Unless it’s an emergency hold all calls,” I said, opening my mouth to release a jaw-cracking yawn, “I think it’s time we stood down and I for one got some rest.” After getting up, I started walking for the blast doors.

  “Yes, sir,” Steiner said in a tone of voice that told me I was about to be disappointed by her next words, “it’s the Senior Select, sir. He says he wants to speak with the man who just got the majority of his space- and planet-based industrial infrastructure destroyed.”

  Anger surged and I could feel the blood start pounding behind my eyes and in the sides of my head. “I see,” I said, turning back and plopping down in my chair as my face hardened into granite.

  Once I was settled, I looked over at the communications section and gave a firm nod, “Put him through.”

  Chapter 54: The Gratitude of Planetary Leaders: Here’s your Hat

  “Admiral Montagne,” Senior Select Grierson said, staring out of the screen at me with half a dozen similarly-robed figures standing behind him.

  “I am given to understand that you have some complaint about having the droid problem in your system settled?” I said politely. I was done catering to the egomaniac who claimed to run this system, no matter how many of his fellow fat oligarchs lined up behind him in support. Still, there was no need to let loose my thunder in the opening exchange. That could come after.

  “Our problem is not, as you so quaintly put it, that the droids problem has been settled but rather the manner in which you have bungled it!” he snapped.