Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  In the silence, emergency lighting ticked on, casting stark shadows in the dim room.

  Soren interrupted the silence. “All right, everybody, let’s get our systems back up and running. We just announced to the Unity that this ship isn’t any ordinary Manatee-class freighter. The time to beat is four minutes and thirty-two seconds. If anything survived, we will have weapons coming at us by then. We have to be up and running well before that.”

  Hands were already moving long before Soren had even stopped talking. At the nav station, Vi was working as fast as her fingers could fly, starting the main computer and then the nav computer. Almost everyone on the ship had something to do in the process of a restart after they fired an EM burst.

  Helpless, Katy sat back and watched as systems started to come back. Navigation was the first station back online. The engines began to whine soon thereafter as Vi charged blindly at the gate.

  Sensors arrived at the three-minute mark. “I’ve got power plants back online in two of the patrol boats. Based on heat signatures, I’d say that one of the interceptors is priming its reactor right now …”

  Katy noticed that Soren startled a little at the news, though she hid it well. She might have been nervous, but her voice didn’t show it. “Get the sensor package deployed. I don’t want anything sneaking up behind us like Mt. Fuji.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Nav time to gate.”

  “I mark it to be twenty-two minutes and four seconds.”

  Freddi chimed in. “I concur.”

  “Max power, Freddi. Redline those engines, burn them out. We need to put some distance between us and those ships behind us. Full mass bending available. We’re not hiding the tech on this ship anymore. Let’s fly our Empire colors loud and proud.”

  “On it!”

  The captain looked toward her first officer sitting beside Freddi. Jones faced away from her, furiously typing. “Jones, did we shut the station down?”

  Jones didn’t look up from his work. In fact, he didn’t answer.

  “Jones!”

  “I don’t know yet! Give me a minute!”

  “Captain, local comms are down,” said Susan. “I’m getting no RF data at all. I have particle comms but nothing local.”

  Before Soren could respond, Jones jumped in. “The EMP may have fried one of the communications relays.”

  Soren sounded irritated. “I thought the whole point of a directed EMP was that it didn’t affect your own ship.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the theory, but theories don’t always work as advertised. I don’t know what happened, but one of the ships drifted a little just before we fired. They may have gotten between the weapon and our comms array.”

  “Fuck. Can we get back to our hack using entangled particle communications?”

  “Yes, but it will take too long. We will be well within weapons range before then.”

  Michel spoke up. “A fried transmitter would explain why I can’t get any data back from the local station.”

  “Can we get around it?”

  “Working on it.”

  Katy thought that Soren was trying to sound reassuring.

  “Well, keep going.”

  Susan sounded less calm. “Captain, I have movement on one of the interceptors. It’s up and running. Muzzle movement! I have muzzle recoil on their railgun, Captain!”

  Soren leaned forward in her seat. “Distance?”

  “84k!”

  At this point, the big board flashed back to life as the regular lighting returned to the bridge. It showed a small attack vessel, engines leaving a blinding blue trail. An eight-barreled muzzle rotated, firing a round at least once a second, if not faster. However, without any propellant, the rounds themselves remained invisible in the dim vacuum of space.

  Katy’s heart started to race. They only had a few seconds before the intelligent rounds began to hone in on the ship.

  A note of panic slipped into Soren’s voice. “Computer!” The ship’s computer chirped its attention. “Full defensive control. Keep us alive and on target to the gate. All measures available including full mass bending and offensive weapons fire on hostile targets.”

  A low squawk indicated the ship’s understanding and was followed an instant later by hard G-forces that pushed Katy deep into her receptive jump seat.

  Despite squeezing hard on her core to resist the forces on her body, Katy couldn’t get a deep breath. Her vision tunneled toward red. She grunted again, trying to keep some of her blood from rushing to her lower extremities. The chair seemed to note her distress, clamping painfully around her legs, cutting off the blood flow and keeping her somewhat aware that the computer was putting the Clarion and its occupants through a series of hard jukes and turns that stressed its occupants to the maximum.

  Katy returned to full consciousness with the computer squawking. “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

  A sudden boom sent the ship shuddering. The pressure-sensitive door on the bridge slammed shut, causing another loud bang as the smell of burning wires filled the air.

  The jukes and sudden turns continued.

  “Report!” shouted Soren.

  “We took rounds just aft of the mid-engines!” yelled Freddi. “We had a seam buckle there, probably where we had that plating from the incident at Fuji. There was a small overload in one of the power relays, but the fire suppression system has that under control. I don’t think any rounds penetrated the hull. They shouldn’t be very effective as long as the computer keeps letting the cargo absorb them.”

  A particularly hard turn caused Soren to grunt in reply.

  While straining to keep herself conscious, Katy noticed the very distinct pop of several containers releasing from the hull.

  Neela’s face appeared on the big board. “We’re giving the computer some toys to play with!”

  Soren shook her head. “It’s a good thought, but those ordnance will just fly right around them!”

  “Maybe so, but the small shells that interceptor fires don’t have a lot of guidance propellant. They can’t really change course that many times before they can’t maneuver any longer, so anything we put in front of them makes it harder for them to get to us. From the way the computer is tossing us around, I gather that’s its conclusion, as well.”

  As if to emphasize the longshoreman’s point, the computer forced the ship into another gut-breaking turn and then started screaming, “Brace! Brace! Brace!”

  Jones, who had remained fixed on his computer screen through the whole thing, suddenly pumped his fists in the air. “Got it!” Then he was drowned out by another loud bang that rattled the ship to its bones.

  Freddi didn’t wait to be asked. “All boards show green, Captain. The computer managed to throw that round into a container full of silicate ores. It didn’t even penetrate to the second container.”

  Soren’s shoulders relaxed. “Sue, how far back is that ship?”

  “One hundred and twelve kilometers, Captain. She’s managed to hold station there for the last couple of minutes. It took them a while to figure out our speed. After all, we’re breaking several speed limits, and I do believe a treaty or two with our mass-bending capabilities. Our acceleration curves must have totally confused him.”

  “Is he still firing?”

  “No, Captain. At that distance, the computer will be able to outmaneuver anything he sends our way.”

  Soren smiled. “That’s good news, but it’s going to be a really short rebellion unless we can get through that gate. Time?”

  “Hard to say, Captain,” Vi said. “The computer has thrown our estimates way off, and it keeps changing velocity. I’m guessing something like six minutes.”

  Soren griped the arms of her chair. “Six minutes! How close are we to the station?”

  “Missile launch!” Susan yelled. “I have missiles launched from the station. Holy fuck! They aren’t messing around. Count: fifteen! Fifteen missiles launched from the station and more coming.”

&
nbsp; “Are we in range?”

  “We’re sitting at about 102,000 klicks right now,” confirmed Susan. “The max range on their missiles is supposed to be 40,000. But we’re coming in fast. Best guess is they’re putting them on station and will send them when we get a little closer. They’ll have seen what we did with the railgun rounds, and they won’t want to give us—or rather, the computer—any time to react.”

  Soren grunted her acknowledgment, then turned to her first officer. “Jones?”

  This time Jones tried to look back at the captain, but his jump seat wouldn’t let him as the computer put the ship into another violent maneuver. “I’ve got comms back. I’m routing them through the ship’s hull, and it’s working pretty well. We’re like a huge long antenna.” Here his face sagged. “But it’s gone, Captain. I’ve got no control any longer. They wiped it while we were out of contact. I still have my toehold in the Unity gate control system, but I don’t have any access to the station overlord any longer. I’m shut out.”

  Soren’s brow furrowed. “Damn! Freddi, launch all countermeasures. Get them on station. The AI can recover them.”

  “We only have ten. We’ll be outnumbered four to one.”

  “Well, those are better odds than zero to forty, don’t you think?”

  “What about the upcoming gates?”

  “We’ll have to trust to luck.”

  Michel turned his chair away from his station to face Soren. “Captain, I may have a better idea.”

  “Speak up, and make it quick!”

  “Back at the start of the war, the Unity was hacking Imperials by sending pulsed code to the camera of the incoming missile. It was really effective. Could we do something like that?”

  Soren was already shaking her head. She clicked on her comm. “No! That code was placed in the software during manufacture. They were programmed to respond that way.”

  Jones also turned his chair. “Actually, it’s not such a bad thought. Remember that briefing that we got just near the end of the war, the one about turning the tide of the war with an aggressive cyber sabotage campaign?”

  Soren looked a little frustrated. “No, that was over a decade ago. Besides, I need you focused on getting us through the gates. Get set up and then get the protocols over to the ship. We’ll figure out what to do about the missiles. Freddi, ideas?”

  “There’s not much time to come up with ideas. Brute force, Captain.”

  “Agreed.” Soren brought Neela up on the big board. “Launch a thousand containers right now. Give the swarm full control. Have another thousand on standby. We’ve got multiple birds incoming, and we’re going to have to brute force our way out of this.”

  There was a fierceness in Neela’s eye that Katy had never seen before. Her cheeks look flushed. “Aye, Captain. Launching 1,000 containers, targeting hostile missiles.”

  Katy felt the familiar little lurch in the floor that indicated a container launch. However, the closed pressure door greatly diminished the familiar popcorn sound that usually accompanied it.

  Soon the big board was divided in three. On the left, a three-dimensional tactical display showed the Clarion, the gate and station, and all the ships in the area. That display was soon overwhelmed by a mass of little green lines emanating from the Clarion and streaking at increasing speed across the distance between the ship and the station, where a large cluster of red X’s indicated the stationed missiles. On the right side, a pair of stacked images showed the nav-cam feeds from two of the outgoing containers.

  It didn’t take long before an intricate dance of opposing AI began. From somewhere in her mind, Katy remembered Jack calling this AI-driven swarm dance “the ballet of death.”

  The missiles had the clear physical advantage. They were far more agile than the ship’s containers. However, at first the missile swarm didn’t know what to make of the large lumbering hoard trundling in its direction. In fact, it didn’t recognize the threat until after three of its missiles had been run over at high speed. Even after the AI began to react, two more were knocked out before the other thirty-five retreated. All this had taken place close enough to the gate station that when it became clear what the containers intended, the station opened up on them with their railguns, which was effective but not as effective as Katy thought it might have been if they had specifically aimed at the engines of the containers.

  Now sensing the danger, the missile AI made a break for it, gathering its remaining thirty-five missiles. It pulled them all hard away, attempting to break toward the Clarion, which soon crossed into the missiles’ range, a fact the onboard AI noted with a squawk on the bridge comm system.

  Vi noted the mark. “Captain, we are three minutes out!”

  “I have our course plotted,” said Jones. “We need to execute within the next minute.”

  Soren nodded. “Understood.”

  It was only a second or two later that a violent flash whited out the left half of the big board.

  “Distance!”

  Susan ripped off her heads-up, covering her eye with her left hand. “23,000 kilometers. Right in the center of our swarm!”

  Katy turned toward the big board. There was a new and growing hole in their protective net of containers; perhaps five hundred or more had been destroyed in the blast.

  “Neela!”

  “Already launching the second wave, Captain.”

  The missile AI had managed to gather a large percentage of the container swarm in a small area by making a hard charge with a group of five or six missiles, sacrificing them to take out over half of the swarm.

  “Missile count?” Soren asked.

  The sensors officer answered. “I count twenty-eight birds still en route, Captain. They’ve spread out, far and wide. We’re going to have a hard time stopping all of them. I don’t know that the second swarm of containers can get up to speed in time.”

  Soren gritted her teeth. “That damn AI was way too aggressive. It should have made them come to it.”

  A rising panic sounded from Jones. “Captain, we have to go now. We have to execute.”

  “I can’t with all those missiles out there. We’ll never get through the gate!”

  “We don’t have a choice. I can only hold open gate control for so long, and then we lose our opportunity.”

  Soren swore loudly and turned her seat toward Freddi. “Freddi, give me all available power to the engines. Divert everything and cut all the safeties.”

  “Already on it.”

  “What about the safeties on the gravity?” Freddi asked Katy. “How many G’s can I give us?”

  Katy looked at the board. “Not that many. The curves are too long. I mean, in really short bursts, up to maybe fifty, but the type of burns you need, maybe ten.”

  Soren sounded incredulous. “Ten? Come on, we can do better than that.”

  “With our nanites, maybe fifteen, but no more. You need to—”

  “We don’t have time to debate this!” Jones yelled. “I’ve got a counter virus sniffing on our doorstep. I’m barely holding them out. We have to go now!”

  Soren grimaced.

  Freddi looked at her. “Captain, we’re going to have to trust the AI. The best way to stop this attack is to get through the gate.”

  “Understood. Authorize the computer for up to fifteen G’s in the cabin.”

  Katy felt her stomach lurch. Someone is going to die from that, she thought. But if one of those missiles catches us, we’re all vapor anyway.

  Soren’s voice oozed power. “Neela, clear us a corridor to the gate. Launch the decoy containers and get them squawking using our known smuggling masks.” The captain looked up at the ceiling. “AI, execute transit plan alpha on my mark. I want you to keep us as close as you can to the station on our approach. Take us right into their guns. I’d rather risk the railguns on that station than let us get caught by one of those nukes. Understood?”

  The AI chirped its compliance.

  “Execute.”

 
Even with the pressure door sealed because of the leak in the spindle, Katy had never heard the engines on the Clarion roar as they did at that moment. The force of their rage punched her back into her chair, rattling her bones. As Katy struggled to breathe, the world around her faded until the roar consumed her and only darkness remained.

  Katy returned to consciousness far too slowly for her liking. It felt like she was desperately trying to claw her way up from the bottom of an ocean made of syrup. Her chest felt sore. Everything sounded like it was under water—the blare of the klaxon on the bridge, the thunder of the engines, even Captain Soren’s voice. It was finally the smell of smoke that whipsawed her senses back to the present. There was another odor there as well—smelling salts, maybe? Katy wondered if perhaps the computer AI had been able to put them into the air supply.

  Katy shook her head and squeezed her eyes, trying to get her bearings. When she opened them again, the first thing she noticed was the open flame on the bridge, coming from several of the panels near the big board at the front of the room. Now alert, she pawed at the harness holding her in her seat. Grabbing at two of the fire spiders attached to the console next to her, she leapt and bolted across the small bridge, past Vi, who was just coming around, her head still lolling against her shoulder. Katy mashed the top of each of the spiders with her hand, activating them as she went. She threw them at the panels, fearing what was behind them. She thought they might have been starting to buckle from the heat.

  Behind her, Soren shouted, “Computer, status report!”

  The coconut-sized balls rolled once and then sprouted legs and ran toward the heat. Finding their way blocked by the panel, they quickly removed it with a couple of cutting torches that opened up on their sides. Fire sprouted from the hole, spreading to the wall.

  Amid the chaos, the computer continued in its usual laconic tone. “There are multiple hull fractures along the spindle. Two of the midsection maneuvering thrusters are non-functional. I have lost bio-signs for Ship’s Cook Todd Gartner and Cook’s Assistant Lilah Thompson. Both crew members were located in the mess hall when their life signs were lost.”