Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10

by Randolph Lalonde

  She passed through the hatch marking her passage through the next deck and closed it behind her, then allowed herself to fall the rest of the way. The explosion didn’t make the impression she’d hoped it would, barely shaking the passageway. Her boots made contact with the lower hatch, and she opened it, falling into the hallway below.

  A group of six enemy soldiers whirled to look at her, and she rushed for cover around the corner, opening fire all the way. They were between her and the main magazine, where all the largest munitions on the ship were stored. Her tactical screen indicated that the nearest emergency armoury locker was on the starboard side, past the soldiers, so her thought of grabbing a more effective rifle was quashed immediately.

  Alice fired several rounds around the corner to force the soldiers behind cover, striking two of them several times, but not so badly that their armour was breached. “Scan enemy bands, decode,” she told her communications system as she turned the intensity of her weapon all the way up.

  “Infantry communications traffic found,” her system announced. “-ordered to capture her alive! Use your gel rounds to suppress and overpower, that is an order.”

  “Oh, crap,” Alice whispered to herself. She fired several more rounds around the corner as her tactical system showed one of the soldiers stepping into the hallway. She sent a white bolt of energy through his middle, driving the rest back under cover.

  Her situation was dire, but the way she saw it, there were only two things she had to do. She considered the first: she had to make sure the ship didn’t fall into enemy hands. That wasn’t easy, but it was possible. The second was simpler: Survive.

  A realization dawned on Alice then, and she smiled to herself as she plugged the last power cell she had into her command and control unit, charging her shields in two seconds but draining half the energy from the cell. “I don’t have to kill everyone in my way, I just have to complete my objectives.”

  With a hurried finger, she drew a path onto the screen on her right arm, down the hallway, past the soldiers, and around the corner to the door leading right to the main magazine. Alice sucked in a deep breath and ran into the hallway, running as hard as she could, firing her sidearm on full intensity, driving the enemy back under cover, but catching one round in the shoulder before he was safe.

  Her weapon was out of power by the time she passed them, and she could see the hall leading starboard. She was almost there when her armour reported a hit directly behind her, a gel shot that expanded under her feet. “Set shield friction to zero!”

  Her shield system became as slippery as a near zero friction skid field, and the expanding gel behind her failed to get a grip. With a thud she slammed into the wall of the port side hallway, the mound of blue-green capture gel expanding in the hallway behind her. There were more soldiers coming from further aft, but she had enough time to reset her shields so she could run to the door leading to the main magazine.

  It recognized her as a Commander and opened immediately. “Lockdown all doors, all systems except for the interior of this room immediately,” she ordered the main computer. She was relieved to see the security locks slide into place, securing the door behind her. She was alone with several tons of missiles, torpedoes and the loading system that was made to move them around.

  Alice hurriedly activated the terminal on the nearest walkway and armed the antimatter torpedoes inside the room, and set a timer for thirty seconds. The sounds of guards blasting at the armoured door leading into the room echoed through the room as she moved on, getting to a hyper-pod hatch on the starboard side of the ship. She opened the hatch then looked back at the security doorway for the magazine. The soldiers were already almost half through, their cutters making good progress. “Well, one out of two has to be good enough,” she said to herself as she unravelled the rest of the grenade bundle, activated the timer and tossed it into a pit where dozens of missiles waited on their stands to be loaded into the system. She dropped into the hyper-pod and hit the activation button. It dropped and fired its xetima fuelled rockets, filling the cabin with a roar and vibrating the hyper-pod so hard she thought it would shake itself to pieces. The whine of the gravity compensation system filled her ears, and the small porthole in the pod flashed bright blue. She made it.

  Chapter 19

  Alice wasn’t surprised when she woke up. There was no way the entire simulation was built into a bunker, but she was fooled until the end. The realism of the simulation, the people there, and the sensations around her were perfect. There was no sense of game or artificiality like every other sim she’d experienced.

  The room was dim, with five cots in the plain grey space. Iruuk sat on the next bunk quietly, his nose pointed down. An android smiled at her as it removed a temporary neural interface pod from her forehead. “Any chance I could keep the brain-bud?” she asked. “That was amazing.”

  “I’m sorry, these are property of Haven Fleet,” the android said as it moved off.

  “You’re back,” Iruuk said quietly. “How do you think you did?”

  “Honestly?” Alice asked, sitting up. She was still in her exercise vacsuit, and the weapon she chose was gone. “I think I passed, unless the flash at the end was my pod getting slagged. You?”

  “I think so, it was complicated. There wasn’t much combat, the objectives weren’t clear. I picked up a group of refugees that were about to be overrun by corrupt bots, but I missed the opportunity to capture an Order of Eden Overseer, I didn’t even have a chance to kill him.”

  “You left your number two behind to assassinate him,” Captain Elson said. “You may feel guilty, but he volunteered, and he had experience in a stealth suit. If I were in your position, Iruuk, I would have done the same thing.”

  “I would have stayed and gone after him myself if it weren’t for regulations,” Iruuk said.

  “You would have failed. Those regulations tell us that the highest ranking officer should be attached to the most important mission, and that mission was for you to escape before Order ships could form a blockade, and you managed to save every refugee in the camp while you were at it.”

  “How was that a combat trial?” Iruuk pressed politely. “With respect, Ma’am, the ambush at the beginning was the only part where my fighting skills were truly tested.”

  “You saved your entire team from a superior force and assessed the situation within one minute and forty-eight seconds. Our predictive model told us that you wouldn’t do it in less than three. Following that, you decided to formulate a mission that saved the most people yourself, no computer or regulation told you to do that. You performed extremely well, Iruuk, better than anyone could have expected, and we had high expectations. Haven Fleet is at war, and we have to take the fight to our enemies, but you lot are being trained as problem solvers.”

  “So blowing the Concord up on my way through the airlock wasn’t the solution?” Alice asked. She couldn’t help but be amused at Iruuk perking up at her question.

  “It was a solution, Alice,” Captain Elson replied. “You got out alive, and I’m impressed that you saved Chief Meckley, even got your second to capture the saboteur, but what followed was standard fare for you. It’s true, in that scenario you managed to heavily damage two of the enemy corvettes as the main magazine aboard the Concord exploded. Charred earth tactics should never take the place of effective procedure, however. You did not send the aft distress buoys out, or scan the Concord for other survivors who you could have helped escape, and there were people in the forward section of the ship that never got the abandon ship notice because they were off duty, sound asleep. I expect you to examine the report on this thoroughly, so you can learn from your mistakes. Overall you accomplished the essential parts of the mission, the majority of the crew were able to escape into hyperspace.”

  “So that’s a fail,” Alice said.

  “No, it’s effectively an eighty-two percent pass, mostly because you did manage to keep the enemy corvettes from pursuing your pods, and the C
oncord did not fall into enemy hands. By the time you graduate from this program, you’ll know what you would have done differently and why.”

  “So this was just as much a command and procedure test as it was a combat trial.”

  “Exactly, we wanted to know how you’d react if you were suddenly in charge while you were new to a crew, because we knew the likelihood of you passing a purely combat focused test would be extremely high. Just like we wanted to see if Iruuk could follow orders and procedure even if it was counter to his instincts as a hunter. He passed with a ninety-seven point eight, we don’t expect anyone to beat him this year, and he deserves that grade. The grade you got will keep you in the top fifteen percent, Alice, a rarefied position that will create an atmosphere of envy if you keep it up. I have other students to get to, you’ll find all the information you need in your after-exam report. The engineering qualifier will take place while you travel in the shuttle to the Everin Building to gather your things. Get going, you have until you land.”

  Iruuk and Alice’s communications screen buzzed, and Iruuk fixed her with a stunned expression before looking down and reading the requirements of the next task from his comm unit. “We have two minutes to get to the shuttle, then we have three virtual assembly puzzles to do.”

  She checked the map on her comm unit and started for the door at a run. Iruuk quickly overtook her, bounding for the bunker exit. “No fair!” she called after him. “Short legs here!”

  Chapter 20

  “It’s too simple,” Jake said to himself as he verified his discovery. The saboteurs who made an attempt on his life when he was visiting Frost used an ingenious but basic method of communicating with the Order of Eden.

  “What’s too simple?” Ayan asked as she entered his small quarters and settled in on the bed beside him. The work order to join their quarters together hadn’t been addressed yet, and he was a little relieved. He was eager to continue exploring what he had with her, but they were both focused on work.

  He wrapped an arm around her and brought up a diagram that displayed who the Order spies were speaking to socially over Crewcast. “These two spies made sure that they were fast friends with people who had relatives or acquaintances near the nebula and Regent Galactic space. They sent video and images they were sure they’d share with their out of fleet friends as soon as they could, like this slider race.” He brought up a recording of a violently quick, close to the ground race across the contaminated flats on Tamber then paused it. “If you look at the code, there’s extra data encrypted that the playback program is rejecting, but if you have a program that can recognize it, there’s an hour of video here.”

  “So, since the person our spy is communicating with is friends with a huge race fan, they forward it on without knowing that they’re doing the spy’s work for him.”

  “The video is set to automatically share itself across whatever network receives it, so the real recipient, the spies’ handler, can access it anonymously,” Jake said. “We haven’t allowed leisure correspondence since we entered the nebula, but there’s a small chance that spies on Freeground, the Triton or other ships in Freeground fleet have received communications.”

  “So, how about telling the crew that we’re going to have an opportunity to communicate with a hyper transmitter?” Ayan asked. “Maybe get someone talking?”

  “I’ll have to make something for Crewcast that looks for this kind of hidden message. I can’t trust anyone in communications with it,” he said. “It’s going to be a late night.”

  “No, it’s going to be a restful night,” she said, guiding him to lay on his back. She kissed him briefly and laid on top of him with her head on his chest. Jake wrapped his arms around her and squeezed for a moment, enjoying the feeling of her there. “If we get to sleep now, we’ll get a whole five point three hours.”

  “I hate to say this, but you’d probably get a better sleep if you lay down in your own quarters.”

  “Not even a little,” Ayan said, wriggling a little to make herself more comfortable. “My brain is firing like an antimatter reactor. I just figured out why Lorander shield technology is so powerful and how to use that in the new shield system. It’s a huge step, I didn’t think I’d be able to figure it out, no matter how much time I took on it.”

  “Oh? Then what would we do in two, sorry, one day when the forward shield system was ready for final assembly?”

  “Put a series of extra capacitors in and use a small section of the hull as an emitter node until we could get out there and finish the job. Now we don’t have to do that,” Ayan said.

  “That would have sucked up a lot of power.”

  Ayan yawned. “Yup, would have made me look like a big failure, too. Instead I’m so successful, you wouldn’t believe how smart I am.”

  Jake chuckled and idly plucked one of her red curls. “I think I have an idea.”

  “You know why Lorander ships have such powerful shields?” Ayan asked. He could feel her jaw move against his chest.

  “For protection?”

  “Sure, but there’s more to it. They need them for trans-dimensional travel. The shield type they use absorbs energy from the side facing away from the ship during transit, so that keeps the power requirements relatively low. That was pretty easy to figure out, and their shields also collect all kinds of energy from weapons, celestial radiation, gravity, you name it. There was an important bit I couldn’t figure out though, and that’s how they projected their shields around their ships without emitters.” Ayan yawned again.

  “You could tell me tomorrow, you’re starting to mumble,” Jake said, lightly tracing his hand over her back.

  “Gotta get it out of my brain or I’ll be dreaming of this stuff,” she said. “Anyway, they use trans-dimension technology to direct energy to where they want the shield to be, and the trans-dimension space they use is full of energy, so what goes in gathers it on its way through, making a shield much more powerful than they would if they made emitters. We could adapt this to our energy weapons, our capture technology for tractoring ships, all kinds of stuff, even new thrusters. I got the math to balance it all out so we don’t fry ourselves now, so we’ll have great shields on Tuesday. The best shields.”

  The implications weren’t lost on Jake. It was simply a method to deliver energy over distances and to multiply how much you had. “You’re right, that’s amazing,” he said quietly. “You could create a tractor beam that would tug a ship hundreds of thousands of kilometres away and use a tenth the energy of a normal tug that does it from a few hundred metres. I’m sure Frost is going to go a little crazy when he hears about the implications for energy weapons, even though he’s more of a hyper-accelerated solids guy.”

  A soft snore against his chest made him smile. He moved as little as possible as he raised his comm unit and started working on the program that would detect hidden messages and find the Order spies.

  Chapter 21

  One More Test

  Virtual Assembly Puzzles made up most of the Engineering Qualifier test. She and Iruuk had to put together a virtual single seat shuttle, a life support pod and a food matter recycler from the contents of a virtual pile of parts. The system showed them every piece for all three devices in a tiny pile on their comm units. The first thing Alice did was project the pile in front of her as a hologram that filled the space in front of her seat.

  Iruuk did the same a moment later, whether it was because he saw her do it first, she didn’t care. Passing was the goal, and she found herself peeking over at his side of the shuttle cabin more than once as he put his three devices together in holographic form. They had different approaches. She tried sorting the parts for the smaller devices out of the pile so she was left with only parts for the basic shuttle, while he assembled all three devices at the same time, placing parts as he found them in the pile. It wasn’t long before she switched to his tactic and found it was faster.

  It was daunting until Alice was nearly half way through test,
and in the end she barely finished in time, spending her last five minutes taking parts she shouldn’t have used on one object to complete another, then looking for replacements for those in the pile. The most unnerving thing about it all was how many parts were left in the scrap heap at the end, she was sure nothing she built would work properly, but the virtual models all functioned. It wasn’t pretty, her shuttle could thrust in all directions, but the life support only had a five day life, and the food matter recycler produced edible and drinkable material that she would hesitate to consume, but it was nutritious and pure enough to keep someone alive indefinitely. The questions that followed the puzzles were few, and she had no problems with them. Most of them covered things an experienced space-farer would know about their life support and power systems. It seemed the Fleet Academy was more interested in finding out whether their applicants could maintain survival systems on their own instead of checking on their combat systems knowledge right away. In the end, Alice was pleased to score an eighty-four percent, even though Iruuk scored eighty-seven.

  A green notification popped up on her command and control unit.

  CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE BEEN ENTERED INTO THE ADVANCED HAVEN FLEET OFFICER TRAINING PROGRAM!

  Iruuk looked up at her with a big smile and drew her into the kind of excited hug that only a Nafalli could give. The world disappeared for a moment, replaced with a warm, living carpet of soft fur all around. “We are in! There is no longer a need for us to compete!”

  Alice took a seat beside him, the shuttle was filling up with other officer candidates who were focused on their comm units. They were just starting the test Iruuk passed. “What do you mean?” she asked in a whisper.

  “You didn’t hear? Our training will be based on a reductive point system, and the focus is on building command teams. There is no need for competition in the system.”