by M. D. Cooper
“Oh, and they’ve started firing at us,” Cheeky said. “Nothing serious yet, just lasers. Our shields are diffusing them.”
“Three patrol craft coming after us too,” Cargo said. “I imagine that they’ll up the ante before long.”
“How are you going to stop at those docks for Jessica and Trevor to get aboard if you’re under fire?” Finaeus asked.
Cheeky looked back at Cargo and Finaeus. “Honestly? I have no idea—other than using our stasis shields, but that kinda lets the cat out of the bag, doesn’t it?”
“Just a bit,” Finaeus agreed. “We’ll have every ship this side of the Orion Arm gunning for us.”
“Have you managed to reach our wayward crewmembers yet, Sabrina?” Cargo asked.
“We could modulate our shields and slip through their grav barrier on the bay,” Finaeus suggested.
“That never works,” Cheeky replied. “You’ve been watching too many vids.”
“And you seem to forget that I’ve created half the tech you use on a daily basis.”
“Well, maybe a quarter…a tenth. But I’ve worked on, or enhanced a lot more. Let me see if I can detect the frequency their graviton emitters are using.”
“Sabrina, Erin, I need you to raise Jessica somehow. Letting them know our plan is cru—”
Turrets began tracking the ship’s position, and Cheeky boosted, arcing toward the ship to provide covering fire.
“We knew you’d have something up your sleeve, Jessica.” Cargo chuckled. “Got a plan for getting over here?”
“This thing is pretty tiny. Think we could fit it in the main bay?”
Trevor’s laugh filled their minds.
“That’s fascinating,” Finaeus mused. “From the Retyna they covered your skin in?”
“Embedded in her skin, more like,” Trevor said.
“Really?” Finaeus asked. “That’s fascinating.”
“You mentioned that already,” Cargo said.
Cheeky whistled. “Now that’s cool. I bet you look way sexy all glowing.”
“Can you two be serious for a moment?” Cargo asked.
Cheeky twisted in her seat and gave Cargo a level look, before mouthing the words, ‘SS Sexy’.
“Jessica, you have the vector?” Cargo asked, ignoring Cheeky.
“Great,” Cargo replied.
Jessica laughed.
“What about those patrol craft?” Finaeus asked.
“Trying not to kill too many people in this system,” Cargo replied. “Got any non-lethal ideas?”
Finaeus stroked his jaw. “Do you have any nukes aboard?”
“Not sure how that fits the bill for non-lethal,” Cargo said.
“Small, tactical, we just need an EMP blast, and enough of a deterrence for them to back off.”
Cheeky reviewed the positions of the ships on Scan. Jessica’s small vessel was thirty kilometers ahead of them, already beyond the station’s spire, which Sabrina was now flying past. The patrol craft were fifty klicks behind, keeping their distance, holding their fire as they approached the station.
“Once we get past, they’re really going to open up on us,” Cheeky said as she dove around a structural support.
“We what?” Cargo asked, moments before Scan picked up a large explosion behind them.
“What was that?” Cheeky asked. “Is that other ship shooting at the station’s ships?”
“Lay it out, Jessica,” Cargo ordered.
“You know how Finaeus and Nance were worried about alien microbes killing everyone? Well, RHY is working on a weaponized version to sell to the Orion government.”
“Fuckers!” Finaeus spat. “We have agreements about shit like this. No biological planet-killing WMDs. We have to take that thing.”
“Well, we just have two small tacnukes,” Finaeus said. “Those aren’t going to do it. We could hit it with all our kinetics.”
“Do it,” Cargo said.
“I’ll coordinate, Nance,” Cheeky said. “Marker is set.”
“Better get moving.”
Cheeky brought up the three pursuing patrol craft on the main holotank. They were all within ten kilometers of one another—a perfect target. A moment later the nuke detonated, its flaring light attenuated by the holo. Then the blast splashed across their shields and Scan shut down from the EM disturbance. When it came back on, they saw the wave hit the station, lighting up its shields with plasma flares.
“Slowed our pursuers down?” Cargo asked.
“Maybe,” Cheeky said, accepting his suggestion. “Too soon to tell—oh, yeah, one just killed their engines, we might have done some serious damage there. The other two are dropping back. I bet they don’t get paid enough to deal with crazy nuke-dropping people like us.”
“Yeah, but now Misha’s other friends in the Undulating Fire are coming for us,” Cargo said with a sigh.
“Show ‘em who’s boss, Sabrina,” Finaeus said with a chuckle. “By the way, I think we need to do something a bit more extreme to that planet down there.”
“Oh yeah?” Cargo asked. “Like what?”
“Well, as best I can tell from Scan, the facility Jessica is sending us to isn’t the only one. Sure, it may be the one making their bioweapon, but we don’t know that it’s the only one. I say we wipe the planet’s surface clean.”
“Whoa, hey, is that more of this ‘kill all the aliens’ shit?” Cheeky asked.
Finaeus shook his head. “That planet’s a factory. They’re going to manufacture their weaponized microbes at scale. Destroying research facilities will just slow them. We need to stop them. If we don’t, trillions will die.”
“Well, what are our options,” Cargo asked.
“Do what you did to The Mark’s fleet at Bollam’s World,” Finaeus said somberly. “Boost out around the moon, and slam this ship into that planet full force.”
Cheeky turned in her seat to stare at Finaeus. “You’re nuts! We’ll get lodged in the planet’s core! With that Mark fleet we had clear space on the far side to drift into.”
“You’ll have to go full stasis for the impact, and then pop out and boost hard. You’ll have liquified the crust at the impact point, so it should be possible to get back out.”
“Should!” Cargo said. “Should doesn’t buy you much when it comes to smashing into planets.”
“Are you sure we’ll have enough energy?” Cheeky asked. “Even if we get up to 0.1c we can’t deliver that much kinetic energy.”
“It’s about where we hit,” Finaeus said. “That planet has a thin crust, if I can find the right fault line, we can fracture an entire continent. That should do the trick.”
“Captain?” Cheeky asked. “Your orders?”
Sabrina said.
“OK.” Cargo rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I’m not going to let worlds get turned into graveyards when we could have stopped it. But let me go on the record as saying that we need to get more nukes…or something…we can’t just keep slamming into everything. One day we’re gonna hit something that doesn’t give.”
“Laying in a course,” Cheeky said.
The two patrol craft still in pursuit had backed off to a distance of five hundred kilometers, apparently content to simply let the ship filled with crazy people leave at this point—either that, or they were waiting for backup.
However, the Undulating Fire continued to trade shots with Sabrina.
Cheeky spooled out the AP drive’s nozzle, grateful that they had managed to purchase a few grams of antihydrogen on Hermes Station before their expeditious departure.
She aimed Sabrina’s prow toward the planet’s moon, Aresa, boosting toward its north pole. As she approached she rotated the ship, describing a tight arc around the grey barren surface, wondering for a moment if they were passing over any underground cattle farms. Once past the moon, Cheeky opened up the ship’s engines to their full capacity, and lit the AP drive. They flashed past the L1 point between the moon and Marsalla, continuing to pick up speed as they raced toward the purple/green world growing larger in the forward view.
“RMs on our tail!” Cheeky called out.
“On it,” Cargo replied, firing countermeasures behind the ship, and activating point defense beams.
“Hey guys,” Jessica announced as she raced onto the bridge.
“Holy shit, you do glow!” Finaeus said, amusement and wonder in his voice.
“What happened to keeping your EV suit on?” Cargo asked.
“It’s fine,” Jessica replied as she slid into her seat “Iris is certain that I’m safe to be around.”
“Sure, Nance, if we survive destroying a planet, we can talk about how I got turned into a glowing superhero to satisfy some debutante’s need for a catchy marketing campaign,” Jessica shot back.
“Jessica, stop those RMs from blowing us up first,” Cargo ordered. “Then we’ll worry about the planet.”
“Oh, crap, RMs! Missed that on my rush up here.”
MARSALLA
STELLAR DATE: 09.03.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Hermes Station
REGION: Naga System, Orion Freedom Alliance Space
Jessica adjusted Scan resolution and examined the pair of relativistic missiles pursuing Sabrina. Correction, near-relativistic missiles. They were still under 0.6c, but even at that velocity they’d be kissing Sabrina’s hull in less than thirty seconds.
She saw that Cargo had already deployed chaff to no effect. She turned the beams on the missiles, but they were jinking too much, and Jessica knew any hit would be a lucky one.
“Priming the rails with grapeshot,” she announced.
“No way you can hit them with that,” Cargo said.
“Point blank. It’s the only way.”
“I knew I never should have gone to Ikoden,” Finaeus muttered. “I was just tempted by that famous salad place….”
Jessica checked the distance to Marsalla, and saw that the missiles would reach Sabrina ten seconds before they struck the planet’s surface—on a plate fault line along the edge of a continent that Finaeus had selected.
“The instant the grapeshot fires, hit the stasis shields, Sabrina,” Jessica ordered. “The explosions will mask us, and by the time it all clears, we’ll be inside the planet.”
“You got it, Sabrina?” Cargo asked.
Jessica saw Cargo nod, but not speak.
Her timer hit zero and the grapeshot fired. One RM exploded, but the other jinked aside, then back, and struck Sabrina—half a second after the stasis shields came online.
Sabrina collided with the planet.
One instant Sabrina had been crowing in delight and the next, Scan showed nothing but heat and pressure outside the stasis shield.
“How long!” Cargo called out.
“Max burn,” Cheeky called out. “Antimatter is dry, spooling the nozzle back in. Using grav fields to give us a pocket for thrust.”
The ship shuddered as the fusion engines slammed their energy into the magma surrounding the ship, slowing their downward momentum, then pushing them back toward the surface.
“Nance?” Cargo asked. “What about the reactors.”
“Then we have fifty-five seconds with this heat and pressure,” Finaeus said. “Give or ta
ke a bit.”
“No sweat,” Cheeky said. “I’ll have us out of here in fifty, easy.”
Jessica didn’t want to know what would happen when they reached the surface of the planet—which was likely molten for some distance—and their reactors and batts ran out of power.
No one spoke as the ship continued to shudder its way out of the magma, until—at precisely the time Cheeky had predicted—they burst free into the atmosphere.
The surface of Marsalla was a roiling ocean of magma and scattered remains of solid crust. Smoke and ash filled the air as Cheeky pulled the ship into a slow ascent.
“Stay low,” Finaeus said. “Then come out at…thirty degrees, that should be in line with most of the debris flying out into space.”
“You wanna fly?” Cheeky asked with a laugh. “I got this.”
Cheeky slowly pulled Sabrina out of the atmosphere, until they had reached breakaway velocity, then she cut the engines.
Below them, Marsalla was in ruins. Cheeky had hit the fault line between where two major plates met, and the result was a supervolcano over a thousand kilometers across. Beyond the immediate ruin, tsunamis raced across the surface of the world, followed by ash and fire as more of the tectonic plates shifted and volcanic eruptions appeared along every fault line.
“The shockwave will shatter the far side of the planet,” Finaeus said. “It’ll be worse than this.”
“Do this sort of thing often?” Cargo asked.
“Yeah, actually…. Though, not with ships I’m inside of at the time, but otherwise, yes, dozens of times.”
“Oh.”
“There’s no way they’ll see us,” Jessica said. “We’re actually going to pull this off…and we got a handy new ship to go with it.”
“Can you get us on a vector to scoop from the star? I bet we can just slip by with our ramscoop out and pick up some fuel. No one will be looking for us.” Cargo said to Cheeky.
“Yeah, shouldn’t be a problem. Will just take some small adjustments. I don’t want to boost for a day or so, though. If we just drift on out for a few million klicks first that’ll do nicely.”