Embers of War (Adventures of the Starship Satori Book 8)

by Kevin McLaughlin

  She reached into her pocket and pulled her tablet out. The one she used on the moon hadn't survived the fight there, but it had been so useful in the field that she'd replaced it as soon as she got home. Beth tapped the screen, mentally crossing fingers that it would activate. It did, casting a blue and white glow over her face.

  Beth heaved a sigh of relief and turned on a flashlight function. She shone the light around the room. The rest of the crew were all there, and they seemed all right, if a little groggy. Ayala also had a tablet out, and quickly activated the light. He shone the beam across the various wide-eyed faces on the bridge.

  Her people were scared, and with good reason. Something had broken while they were using the one system on the ship they understood least well and absolutely could not get home without. Hell, she was frightened. If the wormhole drive had blown, then they were stuck - wherever they were. But for the moment wondering where they were could wait. They needed to get the power back on, or it was going to start getting cold inside the ship before too long. No power meant no life support, no heat, no air cycling.

  Beth undid the straps holding her to the seat and drifted clear a little. "Majel, can you hear me at all?"

  There was no answer. She wasn't really expecting one. With the power gone, all the speakers were out. If the power was indeed cut off from the ancient computer system managing the alien systems, then Majel might be entirely offline. No way of knowing what that would do to her. No way to tell from here how long it would take to fix things, either.

  She heard a gasp and turned her head to look. Foster had unbuckled as well, and moved toward one of the small portholes allowing a peek into space. He stared out, frozen in place.

  "Captain, you need to see this," he said, still not turning his head.

  Beth pushed off from her chair and floated over. She caught the wall and slid in alongside Foster. The windows had been her idea. Monitors can fail, and even backups can go down. The window would give pilot and gunner small holes to look out through, allowing them at least some limited control of the ship. That was her theory, anyway. Even Beth had never expected to lose every system on board the vessel at the same time.

  Foster slid over a little so that she could see out through the window. At first she wasn't sure just what she was looking at. It seemed like it was some sort of stellar cluster or nebula.

  Then she realized her understanding of scale was off. Not just a little off, but way, way off. She sucked in a breath. The trip home had just become enormously more complicated.

  "Is that...?" Foster asked.

  "Yeah, it is," Beth replied. The massive cluster of stars looked to be about the size of a large pizza, through the window. She tried to do the mental math and failed. The numbers were too big, and she couldn't calculate the scale accurately by eye. But the object she was looking at was at least a hundred thousand light years away.

  "It's the Milky Way," Beth said. "That's home."

  Twenty-One

  Three hours later and all they'd managed to do was restore emergency power. The battle damage had cut a line from the backup batteries to the rest of the ship. Once the crew replaced the unit, the Satori had life support and emergency lighting back, but that was all. They couldn't use sensors, and they certainly couldn't move anywhere.

  Thankfully the enemy hadn't followed. This jump was far beyond what the Satori was capable of handling. The maximum jump range seemed to be something close to a hundred light years. They'd traveled a thousand times that distance. If the dreadnought could even think about tracking them from so far - and she doubted it - they had a long haul to get there.

  But they needed to be able to take a look about. The Satori was tumbling a bit, so they could see there was a star nearby. That was likely why they'd stopped in this particular place. They knew gravity wells impacted the wormhole drive. The gravity of this star, sitting by itself in the middle of intergalactic space, must have pulled them from the wormhole.

  Where there was a star, there might be planets. Also asteroids, debris, and maybe even other life, although Beth was rather hoping to not run into yet another alien race. But given they had no sensors to speak of, there was only one way to get the data they needed, and that was to take a look outside.

  "I'm the perfect person for this job, Major. I have the background and experience to get the information we need. And I know the ship better than anyone, so I can examine the damage we've sustained from the outside," Beth said.

  "Any EVA is risky. We've got suits, but what happens if you tumble off the ship?" Ayala replied.

  "I'll have a thruster suit," Beth replied.

  "Still think the captain should remain on the ship," Ayala said. "Respectfully. Ma'am."

  Beth quirked a small smile. "You want me to stay so you can go."

  "Absolutely," Ayala replied, his own face breaking into a smile. "Are you kidding? Space, out here? Between galaxies? Who knows what we might find out here. Yes, I'm excited. I also know we're in a tough place, and you're the best person to get us out. I don't want anything to happen to you."

  "Thanks. I'll get you out there soon as I can, OK?" Beth said. "But I'm taking this first EVA. Captain's prerogative."

  Ten minutes later she was suited and ready to depart through the side airlock. Beth stepped into the lock and closed the first door behind her. The ship cycled air slowly out of the airlock. With backup power, everything was running slowly, in low-power mode. It took a full minute to clear the air from the small chamber around her. While she waited, Beth attached a safety line from the wall to her suit. Yes, she had the thruster pack on, but enough things had gone badly already today. She had no intention of adding ‘doing a Dutchman’ to the list.

  Once the air was gone, a light over the door flashed green. Beth tapped a code into the console to activate the outer door. It opened in utter silence, the vacuum around her cushioning her from outside sounds. All Beth could hear was her own breathing. She activated her radio set.

  "Ayala, you listening in?" she asked.

  "I'm here. Your suit sensors look green. Go for mission."

  "All right, slipping outside," Beth said.

  She clung to the rail just outside the airlock and spun herself out into space. The view was gorgeous. Beth didn’t think she would ever tire of this part of her job. Going outside - seeing the universe from this perspective… It was jarring and peaceful at the same time. She felt at home and incredibly small all at once.

  A yellow sun burned in the near distance. She couldn’t estimate its size without knowing how far from it the ship was, but at this range it looked much like Sol. A main-sequence star meant there might well be planets floating around out there. That could be dangerous for the ship. Space was big, but the wormhole drive had a tendency to veer toward gravity wells, and without the ship’s sensors they had little means of detecting a nearby planet.

  The suit still had power for its instruments, though. She had the suit enhance light intake and project the image to her faceplate. It dampened the star’s light but brought up the brightness on any other nearby objects. There weren't many objects floating in space around the ship. This far out between the galaxies, stars were few and far between. The Milky Way was near enough to appear as a huge spiral disk in the distance, and there were a few other points of light here and there - likely other galaxies rather than other nearby stars. The odds of there being another extra-galactic star nearby were low.

  Beth expected that some of those points of light would be planets. She spotted one right away and had the screen enhance her field. It was a pile of beige rock. There was no way to see if it had atmosphere, but she couldn’t pick out any clouds. That likely meant the atmosphere was thin if there was one at all.

  The second planet was more interesting. It was a brilliant blue orb with swirling whites. Beth thought she could spot the smallest hints of another color in there, under the clouds, but the planet was distant enough that it was difficult to tell. Neither planet was close enough to r
epresent a hazard for the Satori, though. She continued panning around the solar system, looking for more objects.

  And then she saw it - the glint of sunlight off metal. It didn’t look like it was far from her ship. Beth wasn’t sure at first what she was looking at. Was it a metallic asteroid? She brought up the resolution on her screen as much as she could. Whatever it was, it was small, from a solar perspective. It was far enough away that it was tough to get a good view.

  The object seemed to be spinning, and floated somewhere between the Satori and the star, ‘up’ a little bit from her vantage point. All she was getting was reflections from the sun off the thing’s surface, not enough of an outline to see what it was.

  Beth pushed off from the ship, soaring up and away from the Satori. Maybe she could get a little better angle, and view the thing better? Even a big rock could be a serious threat to her ship out here. The Satori had no power to steer, no ability to adjust course. If that thing was headed toward them it was bad news.

  The tether ran out sooner than she would have liked, jolting Beth to a stop a hundred meters from the ship. She peered outward, trying to figure out what she was looking at.

  “You all right, Captain?” Ayala asked.

  “I’ve got something odd out here, trying to figure out what it is,” she replied.

  “Be careful.”

  She arched her eyebrows, although he couldn’t see the motion. Like she would be anything else. There was too much on the line to take unnecessary risks. Needful ones, on the other hand?

  The suit’s screen fed her more data on the object as it continued to track the thing. Gradually, she was getting a complete outline as the little computer fed more detail into the image. Another rendering pass, and Beth froze.

  She knew what it was. She’d seen them often enough before, after all.

  “Ayala, I have an ID on that object. It’s a Naga battlecruiser,” she said.

  Twenty-Two

  Dan smelled the remains of the fight before he saw them. The main hallway of the Independence had a scorched scent, like ozone and burned steel. He could hear the air cyclers working overtime to clear away what was left of the haze, but the fighting must have been ferocious.

  Martelle came toward him. The Marine was still in his armor, which had holes punched through it in the left arm and right leg. He was limping, but still standing despite the smears of blood decorating his armored plates. Dan had a feeling some of the blood was his, and some of it belonged to others.

  “You should be getting medical treatment,” Dan said.

  “Others were hurt worse,” Martelle replied with a gruff tone that told Dan he was hurt worse than he was willing to let on. “Suit’s keeping me up and running for now.”

  The Marine armor would detect injury and do its best to keep the occupant alive. Martelle was probably running on a combination of injected adrenaline, painkiller, and nanites. The soup running through his veins was likely all that was keeping the man on his feet.

  “Report, then to medical. That’s an order. I need you on your feet for the next fight,” Dan said.

  Martelle nodded his assent. “This way, then. You’ll want to see this.”

  He led Dan to the intersection, where medical corpsmen were tending to fallen Marines. Shrouds covered the bodies of several who had been too badly injured to save, and Dan winced. Their casualties had been light, mostly thanks to these people. The Marines had borne the brunt of the hard fighting, along with his pilots. Both had taken losses.

  Then he glanced around the corner in the direction the invasion had come from. He stopped in place. What he was seeing - it didn’t seem possible. But there was no doubt at all in Dan’s mind. He knew what he was looking at, what this had to be. Impossible as it sounded, it also made a lot of sense and answered more questions than it posed.

  There were four alien bodies in the hall. Four invaders had caused all of this carnage. Those four probably would have been enough to take the ship, or at least wreck it, had it not been for Martelle’s people stopping them. But it wasn’t the number that took Dan aback. It was what they looked like.

  Four long, armored carapaces stretched out in the hall. One had been torn entirely in half by gunfire. Another alien’s front end was mostly gone, obliterated by the Marine’s shots. The other two were pierced by more holes than Dan could count. He strode to the side of the nearest and reached down, pulling away the metal carapace. It was stuck fast, attached to all the other plates, but he found an opening where multiple rounds had broken through the armor.

  Inside the metal shell was the body of a massive insect, a creature not unlike a twelve-foot-long centipede. He’d seen them before, of course. On Dust, where they’d first run into them. And on the footage of the battle for Caraway Base on the moon. These were the same monsters that humans had battled before.

  But they were different, too. The other ones hadn’t worn metal armor. They hadn’t been armed - but here each bug-suit had two beam weapons placed near the head. Dan guessed they were controlled in some manner by the insect from inside the suit. It was a weaponized armor platform the aliens wore, not too unlike the ones his Marines had on.

  “The Kkiktchikut?” Dan asked, turning back toward Martelle. Was it possible? Were those creatures on Dust in some way related to the ancient race the Naga were so terrified of? Had the ancestors of those beings been the ones who had created the Satori’s wormhole drive?

  “You got me,” Martelle said with a shrug. “I’m calling them ‘bugs’ until I come up with a better name.”

  Dan chuckled. It fit them. And at the same time it didn’t, because these were no simple insects. They were a star-faring race, and if their guesses were right had been voyaging between worlds when humanity was still learning to build cities. They were old, ancient even. They were ever so much deadlier than their Earth-like invertebrates.

  It was frightening even to look at them, which made Dan wonder. They knew this race had been to Earth before, in the distant past. They had left such an imprint on the Naga that all these years later that the fierce reptilian aliens remained terrified at the mention of their name. Had they left a similar mark on humans? How much of the old fear of insects among humanity came not from some inherited memory of terrestrial bugs when they were huge and predatory, but instead from a time when the Kkiktchikut had visited Earth?

  Dan walked over to the body which had been torn in half. One sword like limb was mostly severed. He reached down and tried to tug it the rest of the way free, but it was tough. The steel covering the arm was razor sharp, and he sliced his hand on the thing while tugging. He swore and dropped the leg.

  “Here, let me,” Martelle said. Then he called out in a loud voice over his shoulder, “Firing!”

  He strode over, rifle in hand, and fired two shots into the body, aiming precisely for the joint where the leg met the rest of the armor. The reports were loud in the small space. Dan could only imagine how chaotic the battle must have been.

  The leg came away from the rest of the body, oozing thick fluid at the end where it had been attached. Dan reached in more gingerly to pick it up, careful this time not to slice himself.

  “What are you planning to do with it?” Martelle asked.

  “I’ll have the medical team look it over. See if we’re actually dealing with the same insects or something that just looks similar,” Dan replied. “But first, I’m going to go have a little chat with Garul. I want some answers, damn it.”

  He started down the hall toward the rear of the ship, shaking his head as he passed wounded men. The medical crew was bearing them away as swiftly as they could, but there were so many casualties it was taking time. Martelle started after him, and he turned back to the man.

  “I thought I ordered you to the medical bay?” Dan asked.

  “I’m good for the moment. I don’t want to miss the look on that Naga’s face when you plunk that thing down in front of him,” Martelle said. “Besides, you don’t want to be alone with hi
m in there if you’re bringing something sharp in.”

  Dan nodded his assent, and the two continued on their way. Four airmen stood outside the cell block, weapons in hand. They came to a rough attention as their captain approached, and paled when they saw what he was holding.

  “Is that a piece of…them? One of the aliens?” one man asked.

  “I need to see the prisoner,” Dan said, ignoring the question. The answer ought to have been self-evident, and he didn’t have time to explain the details to these men. The ship needed to be underway. They might come under attack again at any time, so his place was on the bridge. But before he could go back there, he wanted to look Garul in the eye and get some answers.

  “Stand aside,” Martelle said.

  The men parted, allowing captain and Marine to pass. Dan’s hand-print opened the cell the same as before, and he pulled a tablet from his pocket to translate again. Garul remained on his bed, the same spot he’d been sitting. The Naga appeared outwardly calm. It was a shame, in a way, that Naga didn’t seem to sweat. Dan would have liked to see a little perspiration from this one. He tossed the cut off insect limb on the deck floor between them.

  Garul’s eyes got very wide.

  “Is this one of them?” Dan asked. “Is this a Kkiktchikut?”

  “I still like bug, better,” Martelle said.

  The tablet spat out their words in Naga, clicks combining with hissing noises into something Dan could barely even consider pronouncing. Garul listened to the words.

  Then he laughed.

  It was a deep belly laugh, and he almost rolled backward on the bed from the motion.

  “Something funny?” Martelle asked. He raised his rifle a little. Dan arched an eyebrow. He hadn’t realized the Marine had brought it into the cell with him. It was strictly against protocol to carry a weapon into the cell, for a good reason. The Naga were deadly enough with just their claws, but armed, even one could pose a serious threat to the ship. If that one managed to free the others too… Still, Dan had the sense that in this case at least it might be worth the risk. If Garul tried to take Martelle on and seize his weapon, Dan had a feeling the Naga was biting off more than even he could chew.