Beyond the Starport Adventure (Bullet Book 1)

by Richard Fairbairn

  “That won’t be possible,” Cass stated, “Oss controls the ship’s drive systems. I am trying to bridge the connection, but there’s too much damage for my automatic repair system.”

  “Is there anything we can do to fix the ship ourselves? What about the controls on this console? Doesn’t this ship have some kind of pilot?”

  “The controls here no longer function,” Cass said, “Perhaps I can try to reinstate them.”

  “What can I do to...”

  Quinn seemed to slide out of his seat and onto the floor, his loose limbs moving like treacle as he settled in a crumpled pile. Matt managed to catch Quinn’s head before it hit the support column for the chair he’d been sitting in. He eased it to the floor gently.

  Cass leaned over the control deck, both her hands supporting her weight as she noisily bent her neck down to look at the two men.

  “Your friend is ill, like father,” She said.

  Matt didn’t answer. He was trying to figure out if Quinn was still breathing. He couldn’t hear any sounds or feel any breath on his ear, even though it hovered just millimetres from Quinn’s mouth.

  “What is he saying?” Cass asked innocently.

  “He’s not saying anything. I’m trying to hear if he is breathing or not.”

  “Oh.”

  Cass Linn looked up She zoomed in on her father’s body where Matt had dragged it to the far corner of the room.

  “They look the same,” she observed, “Can you check to see if father is breathing?”

  “He definitely isn’t,” Matt said, “He’s been dead for a while. I’m sorry. Can you please get the ship working? Get your sister working. Whatever you need to do. Please, do it.”

  “You’re angry with me.”

  “I’m... I’m not,” he said, “I’m scared.”

  “Me too,” Cass said.

  Matt could not hear or feel Quinn breathing, but he eventually detected a pulse. Quinn’s wrist felt frail and cold, his skin thin and pale. Then there was a quiet moan from deep inside the old man’s chest.

  “My father would know what to do,” Cass said.

  Matt ignored the statement. He didn’t know what to say. Besides, something strange was happening in the ship. The water bottle Quinn had dropped was rolling to the right side of the room. Matt realised that some other loose objects were doing the same thing. He couldn’t see the view screen from where he was crouched behind the console. The blackness of space had become a misty blue-white.

  “I am going to fall down,” Cass said, “Please help me!”

  Matt glanced towards Quinn’s face. Quinn’s eyelids were flickering. His lips were slightly parted. Matt pushed himself to his feet, staggering to the right slightly. He barely caught Cass Linn as the robot toppled over, her damaged arms still too weak to support the heavy body. Matt and Cass fell to the ground together, the robot pinning Matt with its torso. He struggled out from beneath the machine and crawled back towards Quinn.

  “Jim!”

  The ship was entering the atmosphere of a planet. Matt realised this as he discovered the view screen and the blue image there now accompanied by flashes of orange and white as the ship started to burn up. He turned back to the robot. It was rolling away from him on the floor. As he watched, Cass pushed out her arms and stopped her body from rolling. Her camera eye found his terrified face as he scrambled on his hands and knees towards her.

  “The ship is going to crash,” Matt said, struggling with Cass’s body, “we have to do something!”

  “I am still connected,” Cass said, “I will try to stabilise the ship.”

  “Will we burn up?” Matt said frantically, “Are we going to burn up?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Will the ship burn up in the atmosphere – like a shooting star?”

  “A shooting star? I don’t understand what that means.”

  Quinn groaned loudly. Silverman glanced across to the old man. Quinn’s facial expression had not changed, but his body was moving as if invisible strings were pulling at his limbs. He was lying on his back, his head bent backwards. His hands were on his abdomen, but they were dragging upwards towards his chest. His legs moved like a frog, feet together and slowly moving upwards. His arms and legs were being drawn into the centre of his body, Matt realised.

  The ship lurched again. This time, Matt kept hold of Cass Linn to prevent her rolling too far from the control column. He could see the thin, white cable that connected her to the ship. It was the only thing that would prevent them all from dying, he knew. The ship seemed to be rolling to the right again. Matt felt his body being pulled that way. Quinn was out of reach, a full metre away. He grabbed the mount and hooked his elbow round it. Quinn started to slide towards the right of the ship. One of the brown food fudge containers fell from the console, breaking open on Silverman’s shoulder. Matt grabbed the robot with his right hand, clamping around it’s wrist.

  “That’s hurting,” Cass said.

  “Can you hold onto my arm?” Matt ignored the robot, “I’m not sure I can keep a grip.”

  “You’re hurting my arm.”

  “You can’t feel anything! You’re a machine. Just switch it off or something,” Matt’s voice grew high pitched as he saw the white cable begin to stretch, “Hold onto me! I can’t hold on!”

  “My hand isn’t strong enough,” Cass said, “I don’t have enough power to hold you. You are hurting my arm. Please stop!”

  Silverman’s hand spasmed open as the robot sent a shock through the sensor panels there. He watched as the white cable snapped and the robot rolled away, its arms flailing like an out of control puppet. Quinn was also sliding towards the right of the ship. His eyes were open and staring. Matt realised that Quinn must be dead. The thought was just another shard in an ever expanding kaleidoscope of fear. There was nothing he could do to help Quinn. He watched helpless as the robot hit the wall with a crunch. Quinn flopped onto the robot’s frame, his head slamming into the bulkhead so hard that Matt bit his own lip reflexively. He tasted blood immediately. Something else to add to the maelstrom of horror.

  The ship was plunging through the planet’s atmosphere now. Chunks of the hull were coming away in bright flares. Beneath the ripped plating, exposed wiring and circuitry disintegrated and burned. Powerless and spinning wildly now, the ship fell like a shooting star.

  Silverman held on with instinctive, paralysed horror as the gravity generator in the ship continued to malfunction. But after about ten seconds he felt his arm agonised, as if it was going to break at the elbow. His eyes were closed as he let go of the rigid support.

  It was the disintegrating hull that saved Matt Silverman’s life. More specifically, it was Oss Linn. As the hull began to deteriorate, Oss detected the damage to the exposed circuitry. She had been blinded and deafened by Cass Linn’s Bullet drive, but she had remained functional despite being almost completely disassociated from the ship’s sensors. She realised that what the thermal changes and the damaged, disappearing circuitry meant. The ship was burning up.

  Matt Silverman grabbed frantically at the smooth floor. It didn’t help. He slid feet first into the bulkhead. He narrowly missed hitting Jim Quinn’s lifeless, staring face with his feet. Instead, his left foot hit the robot’s solid body. His big toe broke with a loud crack and the right side of his temple smacked hard against the bulkhead, knocking him unconscious.

  TWENTY THREE

  2195AD - USS Neil Armstrong.

  There were no survivors. The raised hopes of finding survivors were cruelly dashed. The sporadic life sign readings detected by the USS Neil Armstrong's sensors were, in fact, energy fields generated by smashed chunks of the USS Drake's reserve life support system. Somehow, Drake’s auxiliary atmosphere module was still working. Its energy signature had fooled Neil Armstrong's sensor operations team. Deep in the heart of the powerful Earth ship, there was only silence as the Sensor Operations team surveyed the deathly battle site with silent, frustrated anger.
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  There were no fragments of wreckage left that were larger than a metre. The alien warship had completely destroyed the Drake and had murdered any survivors. Eight of the Drake's ten lifeboats had been accounted for - blasted to small pieces by the Enrilean Warship. There was no way of knowing if anyone had even made it onto the lifeboats alive. But it didn’t matter one way or another. It was clear to everyone on board the USS Neil Armstrong that there were no survivors.

  Three powerful Enrilean warships were closing in on the USS Armstrong. O’Rourke was aware of only one ship’s approach. The Armstrong’s sensors had picked up the massive Devastation. The sensors had failed to pick up the stealthy Enrilean warship Mainstay which approached at incredible speed from Enrilean Throne World.

  The Mainstay was a smaller Enrilean battleship. It was fitted with heavy railguns and powerful plasma cannons. Its main engine was a hybrid fusion and thermonuclear blast drive. The propulsion system could detonate hundreds of small nuclear explosions within milliseconds of each other, pushing the ship to incredible speeds in a short period of time.

  Mainstay’s secondary, state of the art, engines set it apart from all but a few of the ships in the Enrilean fleet. Comparable to the Altered Momentum engines fitted to the Earth ships, the Mainstay’s “battle drive” allowed the ship to perform radical, breakneck course changes. Advances to the Enrilean inertial compensation system allowed the Mainstay’s crew to survive the battle drive’s swift transfers of kinetic energy.

  Mainstay was approaching from the USS Neil Armstrong’s left side. Six Predator fighters were flying between Armstrong and the Mainstay. The pilots were oblivious to the approaching danger.

  Lieutenant Commander Niles Grammar and his CIO were the first to die. The Mainstay’s powerful ion cannon incinerated booth men as the fuel and munitions on-board the fighter detonated. The Predator seemed to simply explode in space, a brief flash of orange and blue light that flared brilliantly before dying.

  USS Neil Armstrong did not detect the ion cannon. The destruction of Predator 32 showed on Strange’s tactical display. Moments later, communications confirmed that Captain Keith Chegwin had lost one of the three ships in his wing.

  “Mechanical failure” O’Rourke barked, “Or is there something out there that we can’t see? Turn us towards sector 32. Order Chegwin and Chalmers back here asap. What do we have on sensors?”

  “I’m not showing any readings in sector 32.”

  “Nothing unusual at all? Maybe they have invisible ships,” O’Rourke suggested, “We’re dealing with unknowns here.”

  The Mainstay was closing in quickly. In less than a minute the ship would be able to target the Armstrong with its long range ion cannon. Admiral Zamm ordered his gunner to target the second of the Armstrong’s Predators. It disappeared in another brief flicker of flame and energy.

  “Another Predator down. Chegwin’s bird is off the scope.”

  “Battle stations,” O’Rourke said, “Full power to electromagnetic shielding. Get the others back here. Emergency power to the main engine.”

  The Armstrong’s powerful fusion engine fired as it turned towards the unseen new enemy. The ship started to accelerate, both propulsion systems working at full power. As the third and final Predator was destroyed, the Mainstay finally appeared on the Neil Armstrong’s sensors.

  “Sensors are showing something weird out there, but it’s coming at us fast,” Strange announced, “Looks like some kind of… cloaked ship.”

  “Get some ordnance onto it, whatever it is,” Cutter jumped in with sudden enthusiasm, “Full power to forward cannons. Are they in range of the big guns?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.

  “Twenty seconds,” Strange replied, “Forwards cannons locked on target. Definitely some kind of object coming towards us – now passing through the debris field left by Chegwin’s bird. Looks like…”

  “Confirmed,” Deepblue’s tired sounding voice interjected, “Definitely something with mass headed towards us. It doesn’t show up on thermal or reflective sensors.”

  “Coming into weapons range. Ion cannon port and starboard locked on,” Strange was excited. His eyes shone with a strange passion, “They’re not going to know what hit them.”

  “Let’s hope not,” O’Rourke whispered. He didn’t share Strange’s crazy, inappropriate smile, “Fire both cannons. Maximum power.”

  Mainstay did not expect to remain undetected. The knife shaped ship blasted towards its quarry, its own powerful energy weapons ready to open fire. Armstrong’s more powerful and further reaching cannons found their mark just as Mainstay was preparing her own engines. Both cannons impacted simultaneously, splashing against the heavy armour and blazing in a dazzling pandemonium of colour and luminance. Most of the Armstrong’s energy beams ended up as an expensive light show, but the Mainstay’s armour wasn’t able to refract all of the energy. A good portion of the two Ion blasts tore deep into the armour, clawing through metal alloys unknown to the engineers who had designed the Armstrong’s weaponry. The Mainstay’s armour absorbed the Ion blast, but huge chunks of it had been blown away. The once gleaming pointed bow of the ship had been blasted to a serrated mess of white hot metal and sizzling electronic components.

  The Mainstay’s most powerful weapon was now a fused mass of debris smouldering beneath the jagged edged belly of the ship. Mainstay’s smaller weapons had been unaffected by the Armstrong’s initial, devastating blow. They prepared to fire as the blazing bowed ship hurtled towards the Earth ship. But Armstrong’s Ion cannons had recharged and flamed to life yet again - before the Mainstay could get close enough to fire its own weapons.

  Strange had only charged the Ion cannons to two thirds the power of the first salvo. He judged that a quicker second blast from the cannons would be better than waiting for the Enrileans to fire their own weapons. But the Armstrong sensors had failed to locate the weapons mounted on either side of the silver hulled vessel. Instead they automatically selected the smouldering remnants of the Mainstay’s primary weapon. The energy blasts tore four metres of armour plating from the front, ventral section of the Mainstay. The massive Ion cannon disintegrated in a ball of white sparks. A maintenance crew that had just arrived in the service module were killed instantly. Their remains were shredded and spread across ten thousand miles of space in miniscule fragments of burned bone, sinew, flesh and uniform. Nothing remained of the eight man team that was larger than a frazzled raisin.

  Mainstay’s side mounted weapons came within firing range. They fired instantly and simultaneously. The energy took only a fraction of a second to reach the USS Neil Armstrong. Both beams struck the forward hangar’s fifty metre long sliding door dead centre, smashing right through the six layers of armour like melting ice.

  There were only four Predator fighters left in the hangar and twenty eight engineers and crew within the area when it was suddenly exposed to space. One of the fighters erupted in a sudden fireball, its fuel cells igniting. The ball of fire engulfed six engineers who were working on the ship, killing one instantly and melting the skin from another two unlucky enough to have been too near the first. Of the other three, one man’s eyes were fried in their sockets and another’s hair ignited. The last suffered second degree, agonising burns to his right hand and shoulder. None of that made too much difference. The huge hole in the hangar door meant that the atmosphere was blasting out into space, taking the six dead or dying men out into space along with the wreckage of the destroyed Predator and everything else that wasn’t fastened to the floor or walls.

  None of the twenty eight men and women in the hangar lived. Most were killed outright as their bodies smashed through debris and tangled, twisted, sharp-edged metal on their way into space. The seven men and three women who remained conscious found themselves staring, with fizzing eyeballs, at a vast emptiness of darkness. Within seconds they’d succumbed to hypoxia, mercifully losing consciousness. Their dying bodies flickered through space at lightning speed.

  �
�Primary hangar door breached,” Cutter reported, “Casualties in the bay, sir.”

  “Ion cannon recharging. Second salvo was not effective,” Strange butted in, “Re-targeting the new weapons.”

  “Countermeasures!” O’Rourke shouted, “Where are the countermeasures?”

  “Malfunction in emitter,” Cutter snapped back, “Engineering reports that reserves are firing now.”

  Mainstay’s weapon recharge was at least twice as fast and the weapons were more powerful than the massive counterparts fitted to the approaching ship. The twin Ion cannons flared a second time. This time the rays of energy were disrupted by a cloud of magnetic dust that exploded in front of the Armstrong. Most of the Mainstay’s Ion blasts were absorbed by the dust – or reflected harmlessly into space. A small percentage of the energy was even sent back towards the closing vessel, blinding the Mainstay for a fraction of a second.

  The Mainstay’s sensors were also more advanced. The older sensors - like those installed on the Justice Six – would have been paralysed if not destroyed by the wave of energised particles that bounced back from the approaching behemoth. But Mainstay’s sensors shrugged off the energy, spitting some of it back into space and absorbing what remained. Within less than a third of a second, the nimble Enrilean warship had locked back onto the Neil Armstrong with its powerful weapons. A second later, the Ion cannons fired again.

  The countermeasures deployed in front of the massive earth ship again took the brunt of Mainstay’s assault. Some of the deadly energy blasted through the flimsy barrier, striking Neil Armstrong’s starboard Ion cannon, which exploded spectacularly. The destroyed weapon shattered into deadly fragments. The largest piece of debris, consisting of the fifty metre long tube shaped spark coil, carved an instant, ugly gash in the Armstrong’s hull before flying apart in dense chunks that pounded the Armstrong’s armour. The great scar in the armour instantly exposed four deck sections to space. Thirty six crewmen were sucked into space in the wink of an eye. A further nineteen crewmen slammed against the emergency doors that slammed into place, killing six and seriously injuring the others. Two of the killed men were decapitated by the unstoppable barriers as they crashed into position.