The smell of musty and stale air permeated the space around the men as the atmospheres mixed. The room or hall on the other side of the opening remained obscured in darkness. Ben carefully approached the door and adjusted the sensitivity of his optics. It was apparent that the space beyond the opening was in fact a medium size square room with a single door on the opposite wall. The room appeared to be empty but the D'lralu cyborg knew that looks could be deceiving.
Ken made to enter the room with a flashlight but Ben raised a middle arm to stop him. "It might be better if you let me go first, Sir," he said. "There may be booby traps. I have better eyesight and faster reflexes."
Ken put a hand on Ben's front shoulder. "Just remember you may be fast and strong but you are not invincible. If you spot something dangerous...you get your fur-covered behind out of there ASAP."
"Hey, it’s me. I don't do dangerous! You know that, Sir," the D'lralu cyborg said with a toothy grin.
"Yeah right," Ken said dryly.
When the D'lralu entered the chamber the walls flickered and then began to glow with a soft white light. Ben's cybernetic implants detected a brief broad spectrum sensor sweep but nothing else.
"It seems safe," he said to the men behind him, "but there was a sensor scan so keep your guard up."
Commander Kirkland was the next to enter the room. Again Ben's implants detected a brief scan. His muzzle twitched in puzzlement but he said nothing. If Ken saw the twitch, he too said nothing.
The two looked around for a moment and Yhsif poked his head through the door to take a quick peek. He reached back to grab his pack and Lieutenant Feihc stepped past him. Immediately all hell broke loose.
The walls turned a deep red. A low 'thrump thrump thrump' filled the room. At the same time a series of panels opened in the ceiling. Small laser turrets descended and began actively targeting the large Bearephant...more to the point, they targeted the Modos symbiote. Two of the lasers fired and Feihc screamed. The shots had hit gripping tentacles. Had they hit its main body, there was no doubt the shots would have been fatal.
Ben dove into the massive creature and drove him physically out of the room. Immediately the lighting returned to a soft white and the ceiling mounted weapons retracted. The thrumping continued for another second, before it too stopped.
Ken froze, afraid to move. "Any guess as to what caused that?"
Ben, who was now in the middle of the doorway into the room, shook his head. He stared at the ceiling trying to discern the openings. He could not. This disturbed him more than he cared to admit.
Ken continued to speculate while moving very slowing to see if there was any change. "The funky light show began when the Lieutenant tried to enter the room. What do you think? Weapon sensor?"
"Lieutenant Feihc, are you going to live?" Ben yelled through the door.
"Affirmative commander. As soon as we are done here, though, I'm going to want to see the Doc."
"Yhsif, take his weapon and guard the door. Do not let any of the Bluefin crew in. Lieutenant, go ahead and call a replacement and then get yourself to medical," Ken ordered.
"Aye, Sir," the Lieutenant responded.
Ben chuckled. The Bluefin crew was not in Ken's chain of command, but the human had taken charge and they responded as if they were.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Ben asked as he carefully reentered the room.
"Probably," Ken concurred. "You and I were scanned, apparently to see if a Modos bio-signature was present."
"The lieutenant was also scanned, but obviously when the symbiote was detected he failed the test," Ben agreed. "I'll notify the Admiral."
***
Farnin the Elder stood by the early warning console. He had been in the sensor chamber as part of his fifth day watch. It was his turn at the watch rotation. He took his turn like all Suhtian did. His age and rank had no bearing on this most sacred of duties. That having been said, he nearly expired in shock when the unthinkable happened. A small indicator beacon began to blink. He stared in disbelief.
The flashing warning light had him mesmerized. His father had taught him what it meant...as his father had taught him...and his father before him. Generation after generation had taught their offspring the importance of that simple little light emitting diode. It had the potential of destroying their way of life and yet for countless generations it had remained dark. It was dark no longer. The Suhtian people must be warned.
Farnin hit the red alarm button with his trunk. Immediately, a series of alarms went off around the world. A massive orbital defense grid activated. Coded contingency plans were pulled from various office safes and their seals broken. People who had spent their lives living in fear of a near mythical oppressor were now dealing with the very real possibility that their greatest fear was coming true. The Modos would soon know they had survived and what solar system their people had fled to.
***
The Chairman stretched his trunk. It ached, but not nearly as much as his hands and knees. The Suhtii he was using was becoming arthritic. He had enjoyed being joined to this particular beast many years ago because of its size and youthful vigor. Unfortunately, time waits for no one and the march of days was taking its toll. He thought perhaps it was time to seek its replacement.
He put aside that thought for the moment. He did not have time to subjugate a new carrier host at this point in time. The Syndicate was about to become engaged in a major new acquisition. Before him was a holographic display of the current deployment of his security forces. In a few minutes his generals would be arriving. They would begin invasion plans aimed at opening up new slaving grounds in a newly discovered sister universe.
Normally the SSF (Syndicate Security Forces) would not be used in these activities, but occasionally mistakes were made in the opening of new territories and the SSF was the only means of securing access to them.
Such was the case now. The universe in question was protected by a so-called Galactic Coalition of Planets which was striving to limit the Modos Syndicate's activities in their space. This resistance set a bad precedence, and so the GCP must be eliminated.
The Chairman shook his head in what would have been considered a very human gesture. He understood why the GCP resisted the Syndicate's encroachment but that was the nature of business. In his mind the GCP would do well to take the write-off and seek their fortunes elsewhere. The Modos Syndicate has been in the business of slave trading for years beyond counting. He and his predecessors had seen and dealt with just about everything. They were good at it. The hostile takeover of the GCP was a forgone conclusion.
***
The massive dreadnaught class MS Deepdive sent a specially coded ping, moments after it hyperjumped into the current star system. A small microprobe, no bigger than a human basketball, heard the ping and responded as per its programming. The Deepdive had been following a series of such probes. Each looked like nothing more than simple rocks floating in space but in point of fact they were bread crumbs.
The Syndicate had a covert mole onboard a suspected rebel starship called the Bluefin. The Syndicate had very limited capabilities when it came to tracking hyperjumps. While it was true that scientists could indeed calculate jump destinations from residual hyperjump artifacts, the calculations in question were laborious and time consuming, even for the best Modos computers. As a practical matter it simply took too long. The problem was complicated by the fact that jump artifacts degraded over time. The longer you took to calculate a jump destination, the longer the next jump calculation took. At a certain point it was no longer possible to continue. This simple reality had been a staple of rebel evasion tactics for years, but no more.
The microprobes containing highjacked jump coordinates provided a very real means of overcoming this deficiency. As per protocol, the Deepdive launched a log buoy which immediately opened a jump conduit to the Syndicate home world. Should something happen to the ship shadowing the Bluefin, the Chairman would know where to start the investi
gation.
Chapter Sixteen: No Greater Love...
Cat scanned the terminal room Ben and the engineering team had found earlier. That team, including Ken Kirkland, Sassi, Ben, and several from the Bluefin were actively exploring what Cat could only assume was a debarkation control room.
The terminal was actually many kilometers from the weapons control complex they had originally started exploring. An underground hyperloop tram connected the two sites and, much to Cat's amazement, automated maintenance systems had been able to restore the tram to operational status mere hours after reengaging the long dormant hydrothermal power systems.
Captain Running Stream walked beside her. They had overcome the Suhtii defense systems by means of an electronic cloak that Ken had built according to Cat's specifications. Each Modos symbiote wore one of the small devices on a collar. It effectively made the Modos Captain seem like a different species and thus was ignored by the automated weapon system. Cat couldn’t help but remember the collars that the Modos had originally placed on her people. Strange the direction fate sometimes took.
Shaking her head to clear the thought, Cat said, "I suppose we should look at the computer systems to see if we can find any clues."
Running Stream nodded. "They went to a lot of trouble to hide this facility. There are hundreds of empty launch bays for some pretty large ships. It's almost like it facilitated a secret diaspora."
"If that one remaining ship is any indication of the general size, the Suhtii must have been able to rapidly move hundreds of thousands of their people," Cat added.
"The question is, where did they go? Do they still exist? Will they continue hiding or will they help us end this scourge?"
Ken chose that moment to walk over. He was carrying a GCP datapad that was linked to the WhimPy in orbit.
"101 has finished his scans. We are indeed at the base of that suspicious Caldera that was spotted from orbit. In addition, the WhimPy's deep scans showed a deactivated subterranean fusion reactor. Whatever was going on here they needed a lot of juice to make it happen."
Ben yelled from across the room. "I think I can answer that one!"
Running Stream looked up, surprised at the comment from across the room. Ben was a good thirty meters away and Commander Kirkland had not been speaking that loudly.
Cat smiled and patted the Captain on the shoulder. "He has bionic ears. He could hear a fly burp if he wanted to."
"I'm going to assume whatever these flies are, they are not known for burping loudly," Running Stream said as the three of them walked over to the D'lralu officer.
"True enough," Ben said. "This is what I wanted to show the Admiral. What does this panel look like to you?" He indicated a rectangular area on one of the larger consoles. "Notice the line of what looks like node-arrays?"
"I see what you mean," Cat and Ken said in unison. To Cat's eye the panel looked like a board she had designed during her doctoral research program almost eighty years ago. This panel however was part of a complex system built untold hundreds of years ago. She brushed a finger along the smooth brushed metal surface.
"That would certainly explain the need for a fusion generator," Ken observed.
Cat nodded, still deep in thought. The level of technology seemed to exceed what Cat had observed onboard the Bluefin. Unless she was mistaken the hyper-field node-arrays were coupled with a gage circuit that would introduce a secondary harmonic. The Yorktown had recently been modified to use a similar system to generate a reinforced standing hyperfield wave form that greatly enhanced the efficiency of her shields. She cast a curious eye at her First Officer.
Ken scratched his red beard in thought. "We've seen no evidence of this type of technology in the beta-verse."
"I would suspect it is unique to the pre-enslaved Suhtii," Cat agreed.
Running Stream turned to face Cat. "Would the Admiral like to share her team's insights with the backwater natives in the room?"
Cat laughed and again patted her newest friend on the shoulder. "Forgive me, Captain. What Commander Ben has discovered looks like a hyperfield generator control panel. If we were in space I would say we were looking at some type of active shielding but on the surface of a planet or, in this case, a large moon with dense atmosphere, we are probably looking at an optical cloak designed to hide something. My guess is the walls of the caldera above us will be lined with hyperfield emitters that create a cone of invisibility that could hide a ship launch."
Captain Running Stream brushed his trunk appendage across the console in question. "In my experience hyperfields are notoriously difficult to establish in an atmosphere."
"True," Ken agreed. "Unless you limit the frequency range of their interaction and can supply a substantial amount of energy into the node initiators."
"My guess is their node initiators are going to be massive," Ben added.
"We should make a point of looking," Cat said. "Meanwhile I'd love to have a peek at that ship that is still in the bay."
***
The MS Deepdive entered the new star system and immediately launched its fighters. Sensors had detected a massive starship in orbit around a habitable moon of one of the gas giants. Their objective, the Bluefin, shared an orbit with weapon's laden beast.
Captain Rockfish whistled as the power generation numbers came in for the larger of the two ships. It would take the combined output of every Deepdive class ship in the Syndicate's fleet just to be able to challenge such numbers. The only good news was that the weapons platform seemed to be in a weapon's cold state. The Deepdive was weapon's hot as per protocol entering a new system.
Rockfish made a snap decision. The massive ship was a threat and this might well be his only chance to eliminate that threat.
"Weapon's, get me a firing solution on target 'A.' Ready on the rail-guns and the plasma beams. Laser batteries...fire full power. Keep firing until capacitors are drained. Fire all weapon systems as target comes to bear and your systems come online."
To his crew's credit they didn't disappoint. Immediately, massively powerful lasers lashed out. The energy of those beams dwarfed the surface temperature of this system's sun. The ultra-capacitors that fed them were charged by three separate fusion reactors that immediately cycled up to 110 percent to keep the system firing as long as possible. Two point six seconds into the attack the rail-guns and plasma beams added to the onslaught. The combined energies directed at the silent monster approached the ExaJoule range.
Rarely would Captain Rockfish commit all his weapon systems to a single high-power assault, but in his estimation his ship would not fare well in a counter attack should the ship he was attacking survive the initial salvo.
***
WhimPy-101 was scanning the caldera Admiral Kimbridge and the others were exploring when he noticed a sudden 3 percent drop in his passive shield harmonics. He immediately began a diagnostic review and checked his system monitoring logs.
Three point two milliseconds later he powered up his active shielding. A fraction of a second later fourteen plasma beams impacted his newly fortified shields. He tuned his shields to bend space-time and the energies were redirected toward their source. It seemed a warship had entered the system.
On their way back, towards the largest Modos ship the WhimPy had seen to date, the plasma beams vaporized several hundred kinetic energy missiles traveling at close to 30 percent the speed of light.
The crew of the ill-fated Deepdive barely had time to acknowledge their fate when the power of their own weapons slammed into their ship. Surprisingly the Deepdive's shields held for a fraction of a second. Long enough, in fact, for the automated log to eject itself in a highly shielded capsule.
Regrettably a service hatch on the exterior of the ship had been left open. Normally this would not have been a serious problem but it created a slight imperfection in the shielding. Energies seek the path of least resistance and immediately the energetic onslaught targeted this imperfection. The local shield emitters buckled and the shie
lds collapsed. With nothing but a limited amount of ablative armor between the crew of the Deepdive and the energies they themselves had unleashed, the crew of the Deepdive did the only thing they could do. They died in an explosion that rivaled the sun in brightness.
***
Cat's first clue a battle was taking place was when the WhimPy signaled her via a Battle Alert. A battle alert was an all channels FTL broadcast that was part of the WhimPy's automated threat response system. Any GCP personnel equipped with quantum entangled commlinks would receive such a transmission and know immediately an attack had taken place.
"Report!" Cat snapped out loud.
Running Stream looked at her with a raised eyebrow. He noticed that the Admiral, as well as Commanders Ben and Kirkland, were standing still with distant looks on their faces. Suddenly Cat turned to look at him.
Exploration Page 12