Warpath

by Randolph Lalonde

  Liara finally managed to get out of the doorway, and Finn caught her as she drifted into the lab. “You okay?” he asked.

  “It’s going to take me a while to forget that,” she replied.

  “Where’s our backup?” Stephanie asked on the security channel, her side of the conversation was carried over proximity radio. “There is Citadel aboard, you get here and start scanning now.” She moved through the vault door, directing Agameg and Remmy to do the same. “Grab him,” she told Remmy.

  The emitters in Remmy’s armoured suit, hidden under rows of horizontal armour slats and usually used for shielding, brightened as he used them as micro-thrusters to move to Ensign Rinett. “You’re coming with us,” he said as he grabbed him by the arm then put restraints on his wrists with a practiced hand. “C’mon,” he said as he pulled him through the vault door.

  “Circle up, softies in the middle,” Stephanie said. “That means you, Finn, Liara and Rinett.” Once they were in the middle of a small circle formed with them in the centre, Alaka, Remmy and Stephanie on the outside, they waited.

  Finn took a look at the interior of the vault section of the ship over Alaka’s shoulder. To him, it looked like a large research lab. If someone wasn’t told, they may not realize it was a vault at all. It only had three antennae reaching outside that could be cut off when the vault was sealed, and one door. That, along with a consistent layer of armour around the entire lab, made it the largest vault he’d ever seen outside of one that was made for a cargo hauler. He took a scan of the D-Drive inside the rear of the vault and saw no power readings. “The D-Drive is completely discharged. I can see its settings from here too. If I were to guess, that Citadel spy we caught set it to overload, then deactivated it when the crew were killed.”

  “So are you guessing that it’s deactivated, or is it completely turned off?” Stephanie asked.

  “It’s off. She turned it off.”

  “Triton security here,” they heard over their communicators. “We heard that, Chief Finn. Can we activate systems?”

  “Yes, go ahead,” Finn replied.

  “All right. Lights and gravity are coming back on, get those feet pointed at the deck.” The lights came on in a flash, and Finn concentrated on not looking at the gore at the door. The gravity followed gradually, and Liara grabbed his hand.

  “Okay, never done this part,” she said. They slowly descended the half metre that separated their feet from the floor. “Oh, that’s better.”

  The first squad of fourteen Triton Fleet security officers entered, rifles at the ready, in black armoured uniforms. They moved directly down the main hall to the vault door. “Here as ordered, three more squads behind us,” Commander Victor Davis reported.

  “Start your volumetric scans,” Stephanie said. “Vault first.”

  “Aye,” he said. “Split to port and starboard sides, scan slow.” He ordered. He turned back to Stephanie, stepping over the corpse carefully. “The Triton did a close range scan of the rest of the ship. We discovered a cloaked equipment case in compartment EG-11, but that’s it. Looks like Citadel only managed to get one aboard yesterday. The British are spreading their ships out, scanning for the agent’s ship, but that’ll take a while.”

  “So you can confirm this is a Citadel agent?” Stephanie asked.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Victor Davis replied. The armour she’s wearing matches what we have on record exactly. Do you know what she was after?”

  “I have an analyst and a pair of engineers here who might be able to find out.” Stephanie said. She pulled a flexible, hard strip from the collar of the dead Citadel agent after a moment of struggling and handed it to Liara. “Hook this up and start trying to find out whatever you can.”

  “It’s probably got some pretty serious security, but I’ll get something for you,” she said.

  “Finn, Agameg, you two check the D-Drive, get as many details as you can on its operation, and disable the controls that can activate it from outside the vault.”

  “We already have a full analysis from the Triton Engineering team that studied it before they started building one,” Agameg said.

  “I want to know if this Citadel Agent changed anything, so do what you have to.” She turned to Commander Davis. “Do you mind if your people stick around while I finish my mission?”

  “Not at all, we’ll even help you catalogue this place.”

  “Remmy,” Stephanie said. “Get into the computer system and see if you can find out what the Ensign was trying to hide. Don’t let him out of your sight. Oh, and see if you can find evidence that the D-Drive was used as a weapon on purpose.”

  “It was,” Remmy said from one of the workstations. The Medical Technician was standing beside him, watching the holographic records pass above the desk. “This guy led me right to it. The automated logs record the aft airlock opening then closing right before the flash. The D-Drive’s emitter array was then connected right before Kambis went up. It looks like whoever did it knew what was going to happen to the planet and when. It was disconnected right after the flash, so the power build up would end in some sort of…” Remmy trailed off.

  “Trans-dimensional contamination event,” finished Ensign Rinett.

  “Yeah, I’ll believe that when Captain Valent starts recruiting Kawaii Kittens for his next boarding team,” Remmy scoffed. “Some sort of high energy event that renders biological matter inert.”

  “It’s exotic particles from an open dimensional rift passing through organic matter, at best, you don’t know what they’ll do, at worst, they prove to be too high energy and biological matter can’t survive. As far as I understand it, that’s what happens when you open an uncontrolled rift. No one on this crew had their suit sealed, so they were killed instantly.”

  “Except for the Citadel Agent, who knew it was coming,” Stephanie said.

  Finn started looking through a ring of interface ports for something to match the computer taken from the Citadel Agent as he listened in.

  “I didn’t know she was aboard, I wasn’t even aboard the Fallen Star when all this happened, I was on the Triton, applying for assignment to Triton Fleet when the whole attack took place. I never got back to the Fallen Star. I don’t know anything about Citadel, well, no more than Remmy.”

  “That’s Officer Sands, to you,” Remmy said.

  “Sorry, Officer,” Ensign Rinett said.

  “Lieutenant Commander Vega!” shouted an alarmed Triton soldier. “We found something.”

  “Oh, no!” Ensign Rinett said. “Don’t touch that!”

  “What?” Remmy asked. “You can’t even see where they are, or what they’re doing, don’t touch what?”

  Finn saw Stephanie rush to the other side of the lab. “I need my team here, now. Everyone.”

  Remmy handed Ensign Rinett off to a pair of Triton Security Officers then joined Finn and Liara as they walked quickly to the next aisle of workstations. There were two rows of research grade stasis pods facing each other, with a dozen on each side and workstation pedestals in the middle.

  Finn joined Agameg, where he was standing in front of one with a young woman inside. “This scans very strangely,” he said.

  “Stop scanning,” shouted Ensign Rinett desperately, from across the lab. “No one was supposed to see!”

  “This girl’s DNA,” Agameg said as he gently touched the transparent steel surface of the pod. “I cannot believe what I’m seeing.”

  “They’re all dead,” Liara said as she finished her own scans.

  Commander Davis joined them, and was raising his own command and control unit to do a focused scan when Stephanie waved him off. “Okay, stop. Wipe your data, now,” she told him.

  “I’m just doing my jo-“

  “I don’t give a shit!” Stephanie burst. “You and your men will wipe everything from your scan records on this area of the lab immediately, and you won’t report this, you will not talk about this to anyone.”

  “I outrank you, Lieutenant
Commander,” Commander Davis said. He looked at the scan results then entered a command. His expression had completely changed by the time he looked back to Stephanie. “I apologize. This is not Fleet business. I’ve locked the scan results under a Top Secret categorization. That’s the best I can do.”

  “I’ll take it,” Stephanie said. “Keep your men quiet on this.”

  Agameg looked to Finn with an expression of bewilderment and sadness. “The dead girl here is Captain Valent and Captain Anderson’s daughter,” he whispered over their private channel. “The other six girls are also the same, but they are all damaged frameworks. This one is human.”

  “I didn’t see that, did I?” Liara asked, not privy to what Alaka was saying.

  “Why would someone do this?” Alaka asked over open proximity radio.

  “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out for the Valent and Anderson families,” Stephanie said. “Liara, can you start digging into the logs and see what they were doing here? I’m going to make sure that Ensign Rinett gets sedated then carried to the brig.”

  “We can take care of that for you,” Commander Davis said. “My teams have cleared the ship for the second time. There are definitely no hidden agents aboard.”

  “Thank you,” Stephanie said. “Can you leave a squad to keep people off the ship while we work?”

  “No problem,” Commander Davis said.

  “Finn,” Stephanie said, turning to him and Agameg. “You two go take a look at this D-Drive and learn everything you can about it. I don’t have the education or brains you two do, but if I’m right, and the logs showing that the crew actually used this to get here a couple months ago are true, then the whole fleet could start fighting over it. Hell, the whole sector.”

  “All right, we’ll start working on it,” Finn replied. “You do realize that there’s another prototype being built aboard Captain Valent’s new ship?” he asked.

  “I wasn’t informed,” Stephanie replied. “So I’m the last to know about this, okay.”

  Finn started walking away, towards the aft workstations, but Liara caught his arm. “Do you think you two could do it from these work stations?” she asked, motioning towards the pedestal workstations in the aisle between the stasis tubes. “I feel like I’m being watched,” she said, eying the stasis tubes to her left, where corpses in different conditions were suspended in thick fluid.

  “Yes,” Agameg said. “All the stations are connected.”

  Chapter 29

  The Triton Fleet Shuffle

  Minh-Chu had to admit that the feeling of piloting one of the new gunships was an improvement over the Uriel Fighter he had gotten used to. The controls were more robust, the thrust was higher, and the shields and armour were far more resistant to damage. He could feel the mass as he decelerated towards the Triton’s port side hangar. “Ronin, this is Triton Flight, wave off, wave off. You are being redirected.”

  The new course appeared on Minh-Chu’s Navnet display and he veered away from the Triton towards the Solar Forge. “Acknowledged, following course three eight nine two five on Triton Fleet Navnet. Thank you for telling me at the last possible second.”

  “It was ordered from a Lieutenant assigned to your ship, Ronin,” Chief Paula Mendle said. “Good luck.”

  “A Lieutenant,” Minh-Chu said to himself. There was a great deal of personnel shuffling, with Captain Valent’s crew growing to take control of the Blessed Mission, or whatever the ship would be called once work was finished on it.

  He allowed the computer system to send images directly to his visual cortex. He could sense the ship’s shape, its location and which direction it was travelling in. The wireless signals being sent to his cortex also gave him a perfectly clear view of every direction around the ship. Minh-Chu was still getting used to it, and it took a great amount of focus, because he could see with his eyes at the same time. What his hands and feet were doing in the cockpit was perfectly visible to him, and there was a screen that the system blocked out while he was ‘sensing’ with his brain directly. It was the most recent generation of Sol Defence technology, combined with systems from the Clever Dream, but the visual cortex link was something that Lorander left in the Solar Forge.

  The more ships they built, the more they modified and refitted, the more people recognized that Lorander hadn’t just given them a facility to build ships with, they gave them many new systems and improvements that were easy to adapt, and even easier to learn. The ship already knew him, and he’d only flown it for one patrol. His reaction speeds were already much higher, and he could feel the thrusters turning, firing, propelling him towards the Solar Forge along his desired course. He could see everything around him. Tamber was still peeking out from the shadow of Kambis, where red and yellow flames could still be seen through black clouds.

  The Blessed Mission was half way into the Solar Forge’s main manufacturing bay. Millions of tons of metal and other materials from old ships, parts of an old orbital observation station were being fed into the top of the factory. It would take three quarters of the Blessed Mission’s current mass in materials to make all the modifications that Jake wanted for his new ship, and the miraculous part was that it would take only days.

  Minh-Chu couldn’t help but extend his course using Navnet so he could circle around the entire extended Solar Forge. The broken hull of one of the Order Destroyers was already almost in place for recycling, it hung in the space above the forge, gutted and dark while small but powerful tug bots worked to cut it down into smaller pieces. The lights Minh-Chu could see on the Blessed Missions aft quarter were starting to go out. The narrow rear of the ship was about to change. The schematics for the ships’ rebuild illustrated that there would be four large thruster pods added along with broad armour plating across the top and bottom with two more hangars between.

  There would be new turrets, an extension to the existing beam weapon system, and an array of main cannons added as well, bringing the ship’s firepower to a level that would make most destroyers run from a one-on-one fight. He’d also heard of a new system that was top secret, even above his rank of Wing Commander. No one in his department was to know it’s nature, at least not yet.

  The indicator on his heads’ up display telling him that the Solar Forge was ready to take control of his controls for docking lit up, and he transferred them to the computer. In under a minute, his fighter was slowed to a stop, lowered to one of the starboard docking ports, then connected to an airlock. He was still getting out of his seat when the airlock door opened.

  The Lieutenant he was supposed to meet was on the other side of the door, according to the indicators inside his helmet. He carefully walked across the small interior of his shuttle, which was docked to the Solar Forge sideways, then pulled himself up through the docking hatch. Gravity switched on him as he passed through, the hatch was on the side of the Solar Forge, so he grabbed a rail along the wall on the other side, and tucked, so he rolled onto his feet. It took him a moment to recover his balance, it seemed like the world just tilted ninety degrees.

  “I can’t kiss you with your helmet on,” Ashley said.

  He pulled his helmet off. She was wearing a black and silver tube dress that was both almost too short, and almost too low cut. The shimmering, stretched cloth dress was one of his favourites on her, and she knew it, though she normally wore it in red or blue. The new colours marked her as a combat pilot, a new development since that morning, but she was definitely out of uniform.

  She was positively beaming, her dark eyes were alive with excitement. There was good news, and she couldn’t wait to tell him. Ashley wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him as though there weren’t crewmen and women at both ends of the hallway. He closed his eyes and enjoyed her warmth for a moment before prompting a surprised squeal from her by abruptly pulling her closer. “Hey, stop mooshing faces, public place here,” Alice said from behind Ashley.

  Minh-Chu and Ashley parted laughing. “Hi,” Ashley said to him.
“Missed you this morning.”

  “Early patrol, first time getting my hands on one of these,” Minh-Chu said.

  “Good test?” Ashley asked.

  “It’s a great fighter. What’s this about you being a Lieutenant now?” he asked.

  “It’s all shaking up,” Alice answered for her.

  The couple started walking towards the main hall leading towards the centre of the Solar Forge, where a large Mess Hall that looked more like a ballroom had been built. He could hear the rumbling ramble of voices at the far end of the corridor as the doors opened and closed to admit an Ensign in blue, marking him as a member of the engineering team.

  “She got promoted to Lieutenant, no more lead helmswoman title,” Alice told Minh-Chu. “Nothing changed for you except for where you’re stationed.”

  “That’s not exactly true.” Minh-Chu said. “I have to put together three squadrons in the next three days. I used to be in control of one, with a crew of ten. Sure, they’re transferring everyone who can fly a combat mission or operate a welding torch from Haven Shore to the fleet, but I have to figure out how these people fit together to make a real Space Superiority Wing.”

  “You’re already a Wing Commander, you know what that’s like. I’ve been ordered to remain with the Rangers, I’m not even a part of Triton Fleet! Even Remmy’s been given the opportunity to join up, but I’ve got orders to get grounded.”

  “Did you talk to your Dad?” Minh-Chu asked.

  Ashley’s nod told him the answer only a second in advance of Alice’s mildly shrill answer. “No, he doesn’t have time. First he was in an important meeting, and I couldn’t even get through because I don’t have a rank in the Fleet, then he was busy, now he’s on his way in to Captain’s Mast, so who knows how long that’s going to take. I don’t think he even knows I’m trying to get through to him.”