“Looks like merchanters,” he said, hiding his discomfort. “Colony ships, maybe.”
“Targeting system’s showing minimal armaments,” Sikuuku noted. “None of ’em hot, which is good.” He touched at a screen, studying the video from a camera mounted on one of Hecate’s forward-facing cannons. “Engines look dead. Least, nothing’s movin’.” Another touch panned the camera, zoomed it in on one ship and another. “If they’re colony ships, they probably pulled together like that to make the best use of what they’ve got.” A glance at Henricksen and he pushed the feed to the Command Post, zooming back out. “Put the vulnerable ships in the middle. Armed ones on the outside for protection.”
“Stayed that way, too,” Henricksen murmured, eyes flicking from the video feed to the windows. “Stayed here, far from any colonized planet.”
Which didn’t bode well for survivors. Dead ships drifting in space…
Ripe target. Fat one, considering the equipment and provisions colony ships carried.
“What the hell happened?” he wondered, toggling the camera controls himself, zooming in on the nearest ship.
Perseid, surprisingly. Star cruiser chassis, retired from the Fleet a good fifty years ago and sold off for commercial use.
Hard to believe the Meridian Alliance used to do that. These days even a wrecked warship was valuable, its body a ready source of parts to refit others. Selling one… heresy even thinking about selling one these days. Stupid too, considering all the advanced electronics. Engine systems, weapons systems, the horrifically expensive investment the Fleet made in each and every vessel it commissioned.
Different time, he thought, studying the Perseid on his display. Few hundred years ago no one thought an old clunker like that was worth keeping around.
“Got anything on it?” he asked, looking over at Scan.
Duclos opened his mouth and closed it, frowning at Scan’s panels. “I’m not…” He leaned forward, fiddling with the data feeds, muttering under his breath.
“Duclos!” Henricksen smacked the panel in front of him, making the crewman jump. “Report!”
“Nothing, sir.” Duclos twisted, throwing an apologetic look at the Command Post. “I thought for a minute there… but there’s nothing. No beacon. Just a dead ship.”
“You’re sure?”
Duclos flicked his eyes to his panel, clearly not sure. But he nodded anyway. Tried to look confident.
“Keep an eye on it. On all of them,” Henricksen told him, nodding to the ships outside.
“Aye, sir,” Duclos murmured, facing around.
Closer in and debris appeared, floating around the wrecked collection of ships. Composite metal, mostly. Sparkling clouds of reinforced glass mixed with glinting bits of metal, dulls shreds of high-durability plastics.
Everything drifting serenely. Floating along with that clutch of wrecked ships.
Dead ships—Hecate’s sensors confirmed it. Powered down, no energy signatures showing. No ships’ beacons, none of the electronic noise an interstellar vessel typically gave off. Up close, they didn’t actually look all that bad—scorched in places, pockmarked, a few rents, and tears, and pieces missing here and there, but surprisingly intact. Take the big, orb-shaped ship at the center, for instance. Cepheid science vessel, from what Henricksen could tell. Originally designed for deep space survey. Likely converted to serve as an agro ship or some such. Powered down like all the others, and yet, from here it looked right as rain. Like it should just pick up and go at any minute. Power up its engines and fly away.
“Something’s not right.” Henricksen shared a worried look with Hecate’s camera. “You keep a close eye on Scan, Duclos, you hear me? This place… I’ve got a severely bad feeling about this place.”
“Aye, sir. Trying, sir.” Duclose leaned close to Scan’s panels, pouring through the feeds from Hecate’s sensors. “Still having trouble, though. Radiation’s screwing with pretty much everything.”
“Can you clean up the filters?” Henricksen nodded to the windows in front of him, eyes locked on Hecate’s camera. “Like to know what we’re dealing with out there.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Sir.” Farrow’s head turned, blue eyes hidden behind her Comms visor, straw blond hair tucked neatly behind her ears. “Message from Seychelles. Valkyrie’s compliments, but she’d like to know if we’ve found anything.”
“Have we found anything yet,” Henricksen muttered, flicking through the camera feeds. “What’s the goddamned hurry? Not like those ships out there are going anywhere.”
“Sir?”
“Never mind, Farrow.” Henricksen sighed, swiping at the panel to shut it down. Straightened and stared at the windows, the ships outside. “Tell her…”
What? That they were trying? That they couldn’t tell shit about those ships because their sensors were screwed? Nuh-uh. Not disparaging Hecate like that.
He lifted his eyes to the camera. “Tell her—”
“I told her we need fifteen minutes,” Hecate interjected. “I fixed the filters, by the way.”
She shunted Scan’s feeds to the front window and layered them together, added the video from half a dozen cameras to create a single display. Let the feeds run, providing updates in real time.
Henricksen leaned forward, hands braced against the panel in front of him, drinking all that data in.
Sensors still fritzed a bit—lot of radiation out there, the filters could only see through so much—but the scans showed the ships clearly. Picked up damage to that Cepheid he’d missed earlier: a huge hole near the engine ports, radiation leaking from its old-as-dirt nuclear propulsion system, surrounding it in a dense cloud.
“Looks like that’s our suspect.” Henricksen nodded to silver-sided Cepheid. “AI might still be alive, but the crew…” He shook his head hard. “That much radiation, any crew that made it through the attack’ll be dead by now. No way they could survive in that toxic soup.”
Didn’t explain why those other ships were down, though. Reactor spill was bad, yeah, but space… lot of real estate to play with. No way the reactor on that leaky old tub of a Cepheid took all those other vessels out.
“What the hell is going on here?” Henricksen murmured, frowning at the ships outside.
Duclos snuck a glance at Shin sitting Engineering, sharing a worried look. Shared that look with Shaheen on her far side.
Shin and Shaheen, Helm and Engineering—sing-song names for two joined-at-the-hip crew. Took Henricksen a while to get the two of them straight and keep them straight, despite that Shin—with her copper skin and odd, violet eyes—looked nothing at all like dark-eyed, darker-skinned Shaheen.
“Henricksen.”
Hecate’s voice pulled his eyes back to the front windows. “What? What now?”
“There’s something out there.”
A blip appeared, flashing on the front windows. Electronic signature glowing ghostly against the glass.
“Ship?” he asked, pulling the scan data to his panel, scrolling through the reams of information on display. “What the hell?” The blip blinked and faded, flared to life almost a kilometer away. “Hecate? Your sensors buggy or somethin’?”
“Not sure.”
Surprising admission. Not one you heard often from an AI.
Hecate was quiet a moment, running analytics, pouring over every bit of information at hand. Repeated her analysis when the blip blanked and moved again. A third time when it disappeared and jumped almost a kilometer away.
“What’s going on?” Henricksen demanded. “Is it the radiation? Is it fucking with things again?”
“No,” she told him. “Not the radiation this time.”
“Then what? For the luvva god—”
Perimeter alarms lit up, klaxons screaming as the sensors sucked in information, dumping reams of new data into Hecate’s systems, sending it all to Scan’s board.
“Ships’ signatures.” Duclos leaned over his panel, sorting like mad. “We
’ve got company!”
“Overlay.” Henricksen snapped his fingers, pointing at the front windows.
“On it.” A touch at Scan’s panel and Duclos shunted the data to the curving wall of glass at the front of the bridge, three dimensional schematic flashing with multi-colored lights as Scan tagged each signature, assigning it to one of the ships outside.
Fourteen ships in total. Fourteen of the twenty wrecked vessels drifting in space. Not a one of them actually moving—not yet, anyway—but live, suddenly. Powered up, when before they seemed stone cold dead.
Hecate is available form Amazon here.
Alpha Contact Page 15