Cybership

by Vaughn Heppner

  Jon watched Da Vinci. The little Neptunian and his tech helpers were rewiring a panel. They would pilot the Brezhnev from here, with a tablet providing number-crunching capacity.

  “And another thing,” Gloria said.

  Jon turned sharply. “You’re supposed to be watching the screen.”

  “I am,” she said.

  The mentalist sat at the teleoptic-sensor station. She kept recording the task force, and she also recorded the captured vessels, both SLN and NSN, as they maneuvered for Triton.

  Triton was by far the biggest moon in the gravitational system, having more than ninety-nine percent of the mass of all of Neptune’s satellites. That included the debris that people called rings around the ice giant. Among the Outer Planets, Triton was the only regular moon that orbited in the opposite direction from the planet’s rotation. Astronomers claimed that fact proved that Neptune had captured the moon long ago.

  Triton was almost 355,000 kilometers from the ice giant. It was at a similar distance from Neptune as Luna was from Earth. The moon had a tiny atmosphere. It also had cryovolcanoes that spewed icy particles like Earth’s volcanoes spewed ash and lava.

  Four warships belonging to the task force—and the remaining missiles—had repositioned themselves behind the P-Field. Those warships and missiles had edged to the side nearest Triton. It appeared to indicate that the rear admiral had decided to make a dash for the moon.

  Jon would have dearly liked to know if the rear admiral and her people had witnessed the alien transmission. If not, how might seeing it change their decision? The aliens hadn’t beamed at the Brezhnev directly, but had sent a broad-beamed message just as the rear admiral had done earlier.

  The SLN destroyer hadn’t joined the other ships. The last vessel had moved closer to the center of the P-Field. It appeared as if the destroyer would attempt to use the prismatic crystals to shield itself all the way to Neptune. The logical maneuver would be to use the ice giant later, keeping it between the alien vessel and the destroyer. Maybe the destroyer would broadcast a message to the inner planets. Maybe the ship would try to accelerate away.

  “Have you detected any patterns yet?” Jon asked.

  The mentalist eyed him closely. Did she sense a difference in him?

  “I don’t mean a pattern to the rear admiral and her ships,” Jon said.

  “I realize you mean the captured ships.” Gloria opened her mouth as if to say more, but hesitated.

  With his eyes, Jon indicated the main screen.

  Gloria focused on her panel, tapping certain green-colored switches and twisting a dial. She brought up a captured battle cruiser, an SLN vessel. It drifted at speed toward Triton.

  With several more manipulations, Gloria found an SLN destroyer. This one had a jagged hole in its hull. The destroyer was also headed toward the main Neptunian moon.

  “I’d like a closer look at the hull breach,” Jon said.

  It took Gloria several tries before the image leaped up. The rupture was big, maybe an eighth of the hull.

  “What do you think?” Jon asked.

  Gloria rubbed the back of her neck. “Do you see how the edges of the breach bend outward?”

  He nodded.

  “It must have been an interior bomb,” she said.

  “The crew did it?”

  Gloria gave him another odd look before saying, “That seems the likeliest explanation.”

  “As they attempted to regain control of the destroyer from the computer?” asked Jon.

  “How am I supposed to know that?”

  “Through sheer deductive logic,” he said, “because you’re a mentalist.”

  Gloria gave him a hurt glance.

  Jon wanted to say he was sorry, but he wanted her to quit badgering him. He also didn’t want her asking the wrong questions. He wasn’t ready to tell her about the alien transmission.

  He suspected that she was nervous and scared like everyone else. Knowledge of the transmission would only intensify that fear.

  Surprisingly, his fear had diminished. He was too consumed with the coming assault, the planning of it, the rethinking, trying to anticipate the various possibilities. He realized the others had begun leaning upon him. That might have incapacitated the old Jon Hawkins, crushed him under the growing pressure.

  The grimness in him had turned the alien vessel into an object of intense desire.

  A bleak humor grew at that knowledge.

  In the old days, in the New London tunnels, he used to play RPGs—roleplaying games. He’d particularly enjoyed the fantasy games. He really loved playing dwarf heroes swinging battleaxes. One thing about RPG dwarfs was their intense lust for gold. Gold made them crazy.

  The alien vessel had become like gold to him. A gold-mad dwarf didn’t worry about dragons or orcs. He just worried about someone trying to steal his treasure before he got to it.

  Jon used to sit in the colonel’s study—whether that study had been a coffee shop on a Neptune hab or under a Titan dome didn’t matter. He and the colonel had drunk gallons of coffee together. The colonel had told him historical battle stories, given him tactical hints or quizzed him on correct field decisions.

  There had been that time the colonel asked him what a commander should do if the enemy had superior indirect fire. That could involve massive artillery bombardments, air strikes—the method of indirect fire didn’t matter as much as its reality.

  “How do you face that kind of enemy?” Colonel Graham had asked him.

  “Grab ’em by the belt buckle,” Jon had said promptly.

  The term had originated on Earth during the 20th century from something called the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese had beaten the French and their Foreign Legion and later faced America. The Americans had fantastic air superiority, and used it against the Vietnamese. During one of the battles, the Vietnamese had coined the term and the concept of grabbing the Americans by the belt buckle. They meant to fight so close to the American soldiers that the bombers couldn’t drop their ordnance for fear of killing their fellow countrymen.

  But how did one fight an alien that could turn your own computers against you and make your own warheads explode at just the wrong moment? How did one fight an alien that screwed bolts into a captive’s head?

  The answer had popped into Jon’s mind as Stark asked him about his plan. You storm the enemy vessel with space marines. You grab ’em by the belt buckle. You fight the aliens with low-tech weapons, ones they can’t take over. You fight the evil sickos face-to-face as you crush them.

  There was another consideration. Boarding happened to be the regiment’s specialty. That’s what the NSN had drafted and trained them to do. The regiment had special stealth boats onboard and stealth suits and—

  Jon studied a drifting NSN drone on the main screen. The military drone was just a little smaller than the destroyer behind the P-Field. The NSN drone drifted toward Triton. Every vessel they’d seen—except for the task force and the Brezhnev—headed for the big Neptunian moon.

  The logical conclusion was that the aliens were going to do something to the various ships. They were going to do it while everyone was in orbit around Triton. Would the aliens search for any last survivors aboard the ships?

  The idea put a knot in Jon’s gut. He forced his thoughts back to the tactical problem. The logical place to attempt the stealth-assault boarding attack would be in Triton orbit.

  First, though, they had to get the Leonid Brezhnev there. That meant reigniting the main engines and accelerating to the Neptunian moon. If they used the engines, though, would the aliens think the virus-controlled computer was doing it? Or would the aliens realize humans had survived aboard the battleship and had regained control?

  “How much longer until you’re ready?” Jon asked sharply.

  “Fifteen minutes, no more,” Da Vinci said.

  Gloria glanced at Jon. She had the odd look on her face again.

  “Get it done,” Jon told Da Vinci.

  The lit
tle Neptunian lowered his head as if he thought Jon was going to strike him. The Neptunian glanced at the other two techs. Then, the three of them continued to work with a will.

  -12-

  The four SLN warships and missiles began to accelerate. As the P-Field serenely continued its course toward Neptune, the three battleships, the mothership and the missiles began their burn for Triton. The task force immediately left the cover of the P-Field as they maneuvered into open space. The missiles burned hotter and thus moved ahead of the ships.

  Five minutes later, Da Vinci informed Jon that everything was ready. “Seems like a good time to start,” the Neptunian added.

  “On no account is that correct,” Gloria said. “If we accelerate now, it will seem as if we’re maneuvering in conjunction with the task force.”

  Da Vinci did a double take. “Do you see the separation between them and us? The aliens won’t think that.”

  “You have no idea what the aliens will think,” Gloria shot back.

  Da Vinci shrugged. “In this case, no one knows. We might as well get this over with and begin.”

  “I’m surprised you feel that way,” Gloria said. “Aren’t you the one who said we should flee from the aliens?”

  “I still believe that,” Da Vinci told her.

  “Isn’t staying here better than starting toward the aliens?” Gloria asked.

  “You have a point,” the Neptunian said. He turned to Jon. “I’ve changed my mind. This is a bad moment to begin.”

  “Enough,” Jon said, wondering why Da Vinci had changed his position so easily. “Show me the alien vessel. Let’s see if they’re reacting to the task force.”

  Da Vinci hastened to obey.

  The massive alien ship was no longer accelerating. Jon wondered when it had stopped doing that. The giant vessel drifted at speed toward Triton. It would have to decelerate soon if it wanted to insert into an orbital pattern.

  “They’re ignoring the task force,” Da Vinci said.

  “Give them a little time,” Jon said.

  “What do you know?” Gloria asked.

  Jon glanced at her.

  “You’ve been acting strangely ever since meeting with the sergeants,” she said. “What really happened, Jon? What’s changed that’s changed you?”

  Maybe he should tell her about the alien transmission. Maybe, as a mentalist, she would see something he was missing.

  “Oh-oh,” Da Vinci said.

  On the main screen, at greater magnification than before, Jon saw the orifice of an alien weapon. It looked like a radar dish, with bright golden light in the exact center of the dish.

  “I swear it’s building up strength,” Da Vinci said.

  The light was a ball of golden energy that grew in size on the dish. Tiny zigzags of energy sizzled off the ball.

  “That’s no laser,” Gloria said. “It’s not a particle beam either. I have no idea what it is.”

  “What’s the present range between the alien ship and the task force?” Jon asked.

  Gloria made rapid calculations. “1.3 million kilometers, give or take. That’s greater than eight hundred thousand kilometers.”

  At that moment, a golden beam speared from the radar dish and off the edge of the viewing screen.

  With a few taps, Da Vinci widened the view.

  There were no prismatic crystals in the way, no thick gels in space to protect the warship. The golden beam struck outer battleship armor. Immediately, thick globules floated from the armor plating. The beam chewed deeper and deeper, breaking through the armor. Heavy ablative foam began to boil away as molten steam.

  Abruptly, the alien beam quit.

  The rear admiral reacted fast. Two battleships began an intricate maneuver. The wounded warship slowed down. Another battleship accelerated faster than before. It appeared as if the rear admiral wanted the two vessels to trade places, putting the wounded ship behind the other one in relation to the alien vessel.

  As the two battleships maneuvered, the golden beam struck again. This time, the ray burned with greater fury. Globules bubbled away until molten steam drifted from the deepening hole.

  “The beam’s thickening,” Gloria said. “It has a deeper color.”

  All at once, interior ship’s atmosphere blew out of the breach like a whale jetting mist from its blowhole. The beam sliced through that, digging deeper into the SLN vessel.

  Abruptly, like a grenade, the battleship blew apart. Armor pieces and chunks of spaceship flew in all directions. Some of the whirling pieces struck a nearby battleship. The stricken vessel shuddered, and simultaneously, at least to the human eye, debris vomited from several breaches.

  Jon imagined crewmembers lifted off their fleet, blown out the hull breaches into space. Lights began flickering on the heavy fighting vessel—

  A different armor chunk hit a third ship. It was a bigger piece. Either its mass was enough or its velocity great enough to cause the spaceship to begin tumbling.

  The golden beam struck again, hitting the mothership this time.

  “What are those?” Gloria asked in a hushed voice.

  “Magnification,” Jon said harshly. “Da Vinci, wake up!”

  The Neptunian twisted around in his seat to stare at Jon. The little man was pale and trembling.

  “Give me greater magnification,” Jon said sternly.

  Woodenly, Da Vinci pecked at his control board.

  “Da Vinci,” Jon said menacingly. “You will pay attention to your task.”

  The Neptunian nodded without looking up, although he seemed to adjust his controls with a bit more authority.

  The scene magnified.

  “Those are escape pods,” Jon said.

  “Oh,” Gloria said.

  “There’s a message,” Da Vinci whispered.

  Jon hesitated only a second. “Put it through,” he said.

  The image of ship destruction and fleeing escape-pods vanished from the screen. In their place was a bloody faced rear admiral. Fires raged on the control panels behind her. A dead man lay draped over his chair. Hissing sounds predominated.

  “It’s over,” Rear Admiral Grenada said. She dabbed her bloody mouth with a rag and then let go of the rag so it floated near her head. A moment later, she noticed the rag and swept it away with the back of her hand.

  “My ships are gone,” she said in shock.

  A man shouted something incoherent at her.

  Grenada didn’t pause to listen to him, but she seemed to hear the shout.

  “This is my last message to whomever is listening,” the rear admiral said. “Before the aliens beamed us, they sent a transmission to my missiles. I don’t know how they did it, but the missiles are inert. I’d hoped to send the missiles a command after I died. That’s not going to happen now.”

  Grenada stared into the screen.

  “The aliens have sent transmissions to the captured ships. I don’t know what they’re saying. It’s in rapid machine code. The golden beam, it’s like nothing I understand, like nothing any of my science officers understand. We have some indication what the original transmission did to our computers.”

  A hopeless laugh bubbled from Grenada. “You’re not going to believe this. I can hardly believe it myself. The aliens transmitted—”

  Like a wall, buzzing noises and fuzziness cut off any sound or visual of the rear admiral.

  “Da Vinci,” Jon snapped. “Get her back up. I want to hear what she has to say.”

  The small Neptunian looked up helplessly.

  “Give me a visual of the task force then,” Jon said angrily.

  Da Vinci adjusted a panel. The space scene flickered into life on the main screen.

  At that moment, a golden beam obliterated a lifeboat. One by one, the beam disintegrated the remaining pods. Soon, only wreckage drifted. If any humans had survived, they would have to be hiding inside the gutted spaceships.

  Finally, Gloria faced Jon. Her lips trembled and tears welled in her eyes.


  “What do we do now?” she whispered.

  Jon knew what to do: follow the plan. It would be risky. Doing nothing would be worse. The mentalist didn’t realize that yet.

  “I have something to tell you,” Jon said.

  Her eyes became wide, as if she realized he was going to tell her something awful.

  Jon took a deep breath. Then, he told her about the alien transmission from earlier. He told her why that meant they had to grab the aliens by the belt buckle instead of trying to hide out here. With enemies like that, they had to gamble for the sake of humanity. They would never win a ship-to-ship battle. Instead, they had to go to Triton so they could board the alien super-ship and grapple the aliens directly. Given what they had seen so far, that was the only option left that had any possibility of success, no matter how minute.

  Jon told her everything as she stared at him in shocked disbelief.

  THE MANEUVER

  -1-

  The next fifty-two hours would test their resolve but even more, their endurance.

  First, Jon gave the command. Da Vinci obeyed, tapping the orders into the newly rerouted panel. The Leonid Brezhnev turned ponderously toward Triton. Once the nosecone was aimed in the right direction, Da Vinci cut the side-jets. Shortly thereafter, the main engines pulsed with power, causing a heavy thrum throughout the battleship.

  “Do it,” Jon said.

  Da Vinci adjusted the controls.

  The Brezhnev began to accelerate as hot exhaust exited the thrusters.

  “One-gravity acceleration,” Da Vinci announced.

  Jon sat in a chair, enjoying the feeling of gravity pushing against him. He much preferred it to weightlessness.

  The battleship continued to accelerate. The three of them watched the alien vessel in Triton orbit. So far, the alien ship ignored their action.

  After an hour of observation, Jon left the chamber exhausted. He found a nearby room, piled blankets onto the floor and promptly went to sleep.

  Six hours later, he reentered the auxiliary chamber. Gloria sat cross-legged on the floor, continuing to study the alien vessel. She also studied Triton and the various captured spaceships heading to the Neptunian moon.