by Brett Bam
The field was a gift from her days in the Royal Navy of His Majesty Nikolas Scribe of Titan. She had trained as a fighter pilot in the Penetration Squadron, trained to conduct reconnaissance missions through enemy territory, some of the most dangerous work in the Navy. The field was originally designed to protect pilots from explosive decompression, snapping to life the pico-second atmospheric pressure was compromised. It kept a stranded pilot alive in a vacuum for a short while until they could be rescued. But, Dalys and Jack Mac had made a few adjustments to the field, over the years - black market innovations she had paid a small fortune for. Now, it was a precise and lethal tool Dalys wore with great skill. Fields like these were very rare and highly expensive, especially on a personal level. To the rest of the worlds it marked her as a navy recon pilot and so she wore it disguised as an extravagant steel belt. She never took it off unless there was a real risk of its discovery, which was a delicate and risky balance to achieve here on Deimos.
The field had a set of pre-programmed modes, shapes it would form to shadow her movements. By performing a combination of moves she could condense the dust into a quasi-solid gas confined in the magnetic field. It would take on different shapes, like a spike or an axe. It could be as sharp as a blade or as hard as a hammer. She could coil it like a spring to assist a jump, or drop it into a shield to hold off projectile fire. She could focus the entire field into a dead weight that she could swing like a large bludgeon, open it as a chute to slow a fall, elongate it into a slim strand of fluid steel to be used as a whip. The tighter she compressed the graphite particles in the magnetic field the more solid and foreboding it looked. It took a lot of practice to use the field quickly and efficiently, and Dalys had sweated for hours to hone her skill with the potent weapon. It made her deadly in close combat, and gave her an edge against an opponent as dangerous as a Korporatsie hardliner. Still, she knew her advantage would only last a second, no more. They had Curtis and would not accept a bribe. She would also never allow herself to be taken alive. She wasn't just a water pirate, she was a soldier.
Dalys was walking straight toward the hardliners, she flashed a hand signal at Curtis that said get out of the way. Curtis paled, but dived forward into a clumsy roll that scattered her supplies and bruised her shoulder, but gave Dalys a clear shot at her two captors.
Dalys smiled and held up her left hand in a conciliatory gesture as the hardliners startled at Curtis’ sudden move. Then she swung her right fist in a sharp vicious hook, blurring the field into a sledgehammer and pushing it hard to her left, beginning a pre-programmed combination designed to take out two opponents. The first hardliner was unbelievably fast. He dodged her fist, but the larger field caught him a satisfying blow on the side of his head. He went down. Dalys reversed the hook and chopped backhanded at the second man on her right. The field extended and sharpened as Dalys flattened her hand. The black blade glinted as she swung it. She caught the hardliner full in the neck and blood sprayed onto the deck. Dalys clenched her fist and the field coalesced into a ball on a chain which she dropped to the floor. Behind her a tendril of graphene anchored itself to the ground as she swung the ball full overhead. The hammer’s inertia pulled at her shoulder, making her grunt with effort. The first hardliner was getting up, and the hammer blow flattened him onto the metal decking with a ring that echoed through the large hall. Her combination was complete and both opponents were down, one bleeding profusely and the other knocked senseless. She wasn't even breathing hard.
People all around the sudden violent attack screamed and began to run, the crowd spread away from the small group rapidly. The panic and violence would register on the local security net and the rest of the police would quickly become interested and come running, but Dalys was unconcerned. Now that the fight had commenced her choices were limited and she moved without regret.
She turned and took two steps towards Curtis, who was still struggling to her feet, holding her left shoulder and grimacing in pain. Dalys pushed her towards the ship.
“Run.” she said.
Dalys turned to see a third officer racing toward them, he was pulling his PWD from his holster, finger on the trigger as he brought it to bear. Dalys lifted both her fists and the field solidified in front of her just in time. The impact of the projectile knocked her off her feet and she went sprawling, vulnerable.
Then Moabi was there with blinding speed, a mass of solid aggression and fury.
The man saw the attack coming too late and he had no defence. By the time Dalys regained her feet it was all over with the three Martian agents lying dead on the decking plates, more victims of the war.
This was the most dangerous moment as the Korporatsie used a horrifying tactic. Their hardliner uniforms were laced with explosive materials that detonated on demand. A long wire threaded its way around their uniforms, from their heads to their feet. The shaped charge could kill people and damage equipment. Dalys had definitely killed the first two, and the third man had a horribly broken neck and a crushed face from Moabi’s blows, if he wasn’t dead yet he soon would be, and if their headquarters was monitoring they could remote detonate the corpses at any moment.
“Cops!” said Moabi, pointing at several approaching men in black uniforms.
“Let’s get the hellfire out of here.” The Ribbontail hummed to life as they moved to the airlock. Just as they reached it, one of the hardliners detonated. Dalys was knocked senseless, a mind-numbing wave of sudden shock sweeping over her. The world went white for a second and when her vision returned she was sprawled on her back, everything hurt.
She fought to breathe.
Dalys struggled up into a sitting position, blood drooling from her mouth, the world ringing in her ears. As her senses cleared she saw other black-suited men running across the docking bay towards them. They all had weapons out and were taking aim. To her left, one of the dead men was burning, pouring thick black smoke into the air. The smoke wavered beautifully in the low gravity of the moon. Dalys stared at it, waiting for her breath to catch, trying to avoid the looming panic.
Moabi surged forward, positioning himself in front of his captain. Three of them shot him with tasers. The big black man collapsed, convulsing, while police surrounded him, weapons pointing at Dalys.
Chapter 2
Kulen De Sol
The first thing he knew was pain.
He woke up suddenly, and started to scream. A sensation of plunging into water from a great height, thrust viciously into the tiny confined prison of a physical body.
The pain pierced his very soul, penetrated the core of his being. With a horrible lurch, his heart began to beat, and his blood began to flow sluggishly through his body. There was a deep sustained burst of electricity that convulsed every muscle into horrifying epileptic misery. When it passed, he took a deep shuddering breath. The air burned the tissue of his throat and lungs as it passed through. A sharp prickle erupted across his skin and he doubled over. He took another disturbed breath and a terrified cry escaped his lips. He could hear his own scream, dull, as if through liquid. It cut through his head like a cleaver.
Groups of muscles began to knot and convulse cruelly, causing him to thrash and spasm. Clasping his arms tightly around his knees he tried to stop the damaging convulsions. Every muscle in his body tightened into iron solidity, and the very act of clenching created awareness. He held himself for an eternity of suffering as the pain began to subside and flow away.
When all traces of the enveloping agony had faded, he began to whimper like the child he was, crying tears into the amber liquid.
After an eternity, he slowly became aware of several things.
He heard the dull thumping of his own heart, muffled and throbbing in his chest. In the absence of all else the sound enthralled him and he listened to its rhythmic beat as intently as he could. He felt the passage of blood through his body, the veins were a threaded mass of liquid lead scalding through him. His stomach curdled and his bladder, bereft of controlling influe
nces, vented a stinking load into the liquid around him. He tasted the texture of his body, and his stomach rebelled. The bitter taste of bile erupted in his mouth and he opened his lips to let the foul substance pass.
He felt his teeth clash harshly on some metal object jammed into his mouth.
It was foreign, not part of him. Instinctively he tried to wrench it out, but then became aware of the sweet oxygen flowing into his lungs. It was breathing for him, easing his pain. It flowed like pure relief, and he felt the demand for more and more. His body temperature soared at the sudden increase of pleasure and relief. His homeostatic system struggled wildly to right itself and the extra energy fed his mind as the confusion relented slowly, and he was dragged into the world. For the first time he felt a type of nervous calm begin to settle.
His eyes began to itch and he felt his eyelids twitch. He opened them.
Light and sight and hot pain flared and flashed straight to the back of his head, triggering another convulsion. He shut his eyes desperately, but this time the agony engulfed him like a wave, throwing him into spinning confusion and total disorientation. Having no choice in the matter, his defences collapsed, the overwhelming torrent tearing his awareness asunder. He had no choice but to accept the flowing pressures and let them sweep him along. He felt the wave of anguish reach a bitter climax and rolled with it, too weak to fight, exhausted by the effort. Eventually, with a kind of relief, he surrendered to the inexorable pull of unconsciousness, abandoning the horror of life to itself. He fled into a deep and dreamless coma where pain, fear and confusion could not follow. Blessed peace enveloped him.
He did not dream, and so passed his first day and his first night.
Chapter 3
Dalys
The Ribbontail’s weapon array was primarily used for fending off larger projectiles that approached the cargo mass it pushed, usually a spherical iceberg exuded from a conduit and frozen in space. They weighed thousands of tons, and the array had to be highly sophisticated to successfully defend it from impact damage. Or at least, that was Dalys’ justification for it. She had spent a small fortune on upgrades which were camouflaged in both the hardware and software. The Ribbontail was a lot more dangerous than she looked. The array consisted of four hard-projectile, rapid-fire kinetic guns mounted on different sides of the ship. Between them they could cover any point in all hemispheres.
The snick and whine of the set taking aim was like sliding wet metal. It commanded everyone’s attention when it the barrel of the gun rolled out of a recess on the port bow.
“Hold it boys.” Jack Mac’s voice boomed from the ship. “Release that man and back away from the ship. Two-minute warning, Captain.”
The gathered police looked at each other and stopped moving, they did not release Moabi.
And so, Jack Mac pulled the trigger. There was a blink of white noise and a hiss of showering sparks. One of the Korporatsie agents disappeared in a spray of blood. The noise was deafening, and when the smoke cleared there was nothing left of him but a smear on the scarred decking plates. Most of the force scattered and fled back to the entrance portals abandoning the two men holding Moabi. Dalys grinned and stood, wiping the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Don’t move.” She pointed her finger at the men who glared back at her. But the hardliner lifted his shock baton and jabbed Moabi in the back of his knees, the big man fell hard.
“Bitch! You want this filth? Take it.” Spat one of the captives, a man with a vicious scar across his face, they began to move away carefully.
Dalys made sure that Moabi was standing under his own steam. “Get inside.”
Oscar had stared in open-mouthed horror at the explosion of violence in the docking bay. He was stuck just inside the airlock where Moabi had abandoned him at the start of the fight. It all happened so quickly he was still in shock, cowering in a corner. Most of the men had abandoned the dock, leaving Moabi and Dalys alone out there with the remaining Korporatsie corpses which were still smouldering. They could still be detonated at any second, and Dalys and Moabi were still out there. As soon as he realised this he stood up and moved forward, eyes wide and glasses flashing. He covered his vision in diagnostic filters and started looking for the Korporatsie electronic activity footprint, searching for a way to shut them down or cut their communications at the source.
He stepped past Dalys and approached the body on the ground, scanning it with functions on his data glasses, examining the electronic activity.
“This one is about to explode.” he declared.
He pulled a data wand from his pocket and tapped it to the memory crystal the corpse wore as a pendant, dropping a virus into the memory core that ran the Martian’s enhancements. The virus spread through the software embedded in the hardliners tattoos, like a stain through cloth. It quickly suspended all functions.
He looked at Dalys and grinned just in time for her to yank him unceremoniously to his feet and pull him towards the ship. They stepped inside the airlock as it cycled shut and Oscar was given his first quick tour of the ship, his arm crushed to bruises in Dalys’ grip, stumbling over his own feet as she pulled him forward.
They gained the Remote Handling Station, the RHS, and stepped through the dilated portal of the internal airlock. Oscar found himself in a small space, dominated by work terminals and bright colourful screens. All four walls were holo display panels. There were seven workplaces fitted for operation with sleeved gravity couches; useful under heavy thrust. They were snug, but they slotted into the consoles smoothly, and they weren’t too difficult to climb into. Two of the couches were open. Dalys pushed Oscar into one and jabbed at a panel. The sleeve promptly slid shut, locking Oscar in like a chambered round in a gun. He was denied access to the system, trapped and helpless.
Curtis was just strapping into the communications console, while a colourful young woman Oscar had not met, prepped the pilot’s sleeve for Dalys. She was toggling switches and sliding power bars up to full. Her wildly spiked hair was a yellow and green thorny mess.
Dalys spoke directly to Curtis as she strapped into the captain’s sleeve, “Are you alright?” Curtis flashed Dalys a guilty look. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“What happened?”
“I was coming through the terminal when they just appeared out of nowhere and started asking all kinds of questions. I didn't answer any of them so they decided to just walk straight up to our front door. My comm set died, I didn't know what to do.”
“You did the right thing Doctor, nice dive by the way.” She turned back to Moabi, “Monitor the security channels, let’s see what they’re up to.”
Dalys stripped the gloves from her hands, exposing delicately intertwined tattoos which covered her palms. They were embedded with circuitry which glowed as she touched them to the Ribbontail’s flight pads.
“Let’s go, shall we?”
Pressurised air hissed, umbilicals were released, locks cycled shut. The magnetic footprint was deactivated and the starship lifted free of its moorings under minimal thrust.
Oscar looked around at the crew. They were all calm and collected, obviously used to tense situations.
The girl with the colourful spiky hair turned to Dalys.
“Skipper, there are seventeen armed ships in-system. Fourteen of them are on a receding trajectory and the rest are all at least thirty minutes away, and that’s under three G’s acceleration. Nobody’s in a position to stop us. All we have to worry about is the dock’s security systems.”
Deimos was a massive port. Much of the human traffic to and from Mars slid past it at some point before making planetfall. It was a well-defended moon and the Ribbontail could have all kinds of trouble leaving the system. They had to be very quick and precise and would be very lucky to get clean away. Thrust began as the ship’s fusion rocket ignited and pushed her away. A giant sat on Oscar’s chest making it hard to breathe. It shifted twice as Dalys changed course, but Oscar couldn’t focus on anything other than t
he effort of taking the next breath. He was shut out of the system, and had no access to any of the information on board. He had no idea where they were going or what was happening outside the ship. He didn’t care because he couldn’t breathe. The fight to inhale was all that mattered for a long while as his weight shifted back and forth.
And then finally, after three and a half hours of harsh acceleration, the bruising velocity ended and Oscar was plunged into freefall. His stomach did a flip and he vomited noisily. The noxious liquid splashed around the confines of the couch and he heard the colourful girl Dalys had called Berea laughing so hard she snorted.
“Right folks, we’re on the way out of here. I’ve put us into an escape orbit that’ll carry us out of the system in just under 40 minutes. Jack Mac, I don’t think anybody can catch us, but I want you to keep an eye on it for me.”
The man nodded and turned back to his console.
“We’ve got a long flight ahead of us. Better make yourselves comfy.”
Jack Mac spoke, “Where are we going Captain?”
“The only place we can, Earth.”
Oscar was highly alarmed, “What? Why Earth?”
“Phobos is coming.”
“What?”
“Phobos is closer to Mars and orbits the planet much faster than Deimos, it’s getting closer every second. If you know anything about your home it should make sense to you.”
Phobos was the central hub for the Korporatsie Navy. If Deimos was the immoral capitol of the Korporatsie, Phobos was its moral capitol. It was a vast military base with its headquarters in Stickney Crater. From this base, millions upon millions of Korporatsie soldiers could mobilise within a heartbeat. The fast orbit of the sister moon meant that the navy was getting closer by the minute and if she miscalculated their escape orbit, they would fall into firing range of their naval corvettes.