The Infinity Brigade #3, Stone Breaker

by Andrew Beery

  “I’m familiar with this race. We call them Ollies. They are highly intelligent and typically friendly. I’m hard pressed to believe that they would wantonly destroy a ship they were living on.”

  “I estimate that they have been living on this ship for many generations, perhaps something in excess of three-hundred of your years. It is likely they came from the Fabricator’s home galaxy with the original Fabricator crew. It’s hard to believe that you have encountered this particular race before. It is also quite possible that over the course of time they have lost the knowledge that allowed them to function onboard this vessel.”

  The lights dimmed briefly and there was a groaning that shook the floor.

  “The Ollies are a problem for another time,” I said. “If we don’t get this door open and get access to the fusion reactor, there won’t be an Ollie problem to solve.”

  Moments later the door swished open as Fred actuated the control systems. It seemed he had virtually unlimited access to the ship. I filed that thought under ‘potentially useful down the road.’

  The engineering room was a mess. There had to be sixty or more dead or dying Ollies in various states of decomposition laying around a room maybe half again as large as the Defiant’s hanger bay.

  There appeared to be numerous makeshift carts and sleds scattered about the room. Most were laden with pieces of equipment.

  The fusion core itself was easy to spot. Physics didn’t care what race was doing the engineering. Certain shapes and designs were optimal of a given purpose and that was that.

  “Can you access the control systems and scram the reactor,” I asked.

  “Unlikely Commander. The control system seems to have been disassembled. Most of its components are in one of those carts.”

  “Can you fix it… it looks a little more complicated than a toaster?”

  “Normally I would use a replicator to fabricate replacement parts, but it seems most of the fabricators have been similarly disassembled. There are two working units on the far side of the ship, but it is unlikely they could produce the required parts in a time to avoid a core breach.”

  “OK, what’s plan B?” I said.

  “There was a plan A?” Fred responded.

  “Yes, there was a plan A,” I snapped back. “First, we get into engineering and then we flip the switch to scram the reactor. So, we need a plan B. There is always a plan B.”

  “Is this what you would call optimism?”

  I looked at the little guy. There were times I truly felt he had been spending too much time with bad influences… like JJ Hammond.

  “This is what I would call snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. There are always options. How close are we to the outer hull? If we can’t stop it from exploding can we redirect the explosion so most of the ship survives?”

  “I don’t think so. We are pretty close to the center of the ship. However, there is a procedure for jettisoning the core in the event of a breach using the teleportation system.”

  “Let me guess. The controls for this are part of the scram control system.”

  “That is true. However, as Lieutenant Hammond is fond to telling me, there is more than one way to remove the hair from a cat.”

  Apparently, I had been right. The little guy was definitely spending too much time with JJ.

  “So, how do we make this happen?”

  The vibrations shaking the engineering room and the number of flashing warning lights was beginning to make me nervous. I knew I would be alright… and there was a good chance Fred would as well, but I didn’t want to lose the Ollies once again. It had nearly destroyed me the last time.

  Fred spun towards the massive door we had entered and moved at a speed that would have been difficult for an unenhanced man to match. I followed him easily as I was both enhanced and was wearing a Stark suit.

  “There is a control center for the teleport system located about a quarter of a kilometer down this passage. It should give us complete access to the system.”

  “How do we know the Ollies haven’t torn it apart as well,” I asked as I jogged alongside the Fabricator robot.

  “We have been using the system,” Fred replied simply.

  I couldn’t argue with his logic. We covered the quarter kilometer in about twenty seconds. The door to the control center was already open. I had a bad feeling about that, but it wasn’t as if we had a lot of options. I expected Fred to teleport to safety any moment as the core did its best supernova imitation.

  No sooner had we entered the large control center then Fred and I both started taking hits from some type of low speed kinetic weapon system. In point of fact, we seemed to be taking hits from multiple directions.

  Fred was many things, but impervious to bullets was not one of them. Almost immediately his levitation system failed, and he began to smoke. At the same time, about half of his lights went out.

  I quickly grabbed him and dashed behind the only cover I could find. It looked like a large electrical transformer, but for all I knew it could be the Fabricator’s version of a portable restroom. Some rounds were still hitting me, but I was effectively shielding my damaged friend.

  “Little buddy, are you OK?”

  “I remain functional. Most systems are still operational. I am beginning internal repair procedures.”

  Fred’s voice was normal but a little clipped. I suppose that is probably normal when people start filling you with lead or whatever it was they were firing at us.

  “Fair enough. Teleport back to the gate and head over to the Defiant. I’ll handle things here… you just talk me through what I need to do.”

  “I mean no disrespect, Commander, but I cannot do that.”

  “Is the system too complicated for me to handle? I can tie into Yorky for an assist if I need to.”

  “I have every confidence in the Yorktown’s AI and in your own abilities. However, I cannot leave because my near-field communications system is out. I have no way of instructing the teleport system that I wish to translocate. Also, I cannot move so, even if I could open a corridor, I would have no way of utilizing it unless you carried me… which would negate the purpose of this venture.”

  “OK,” I thought out loud. “My armor is doing a pretty good job of protecting me. I should be able to literally walk over to the control panel. You just need to talk me through the process.”

  “I’m afraid I will need to see the current configuration of the system in order to do that.”

  I popped my head around the corner of the port-a-john or whatever it was. The room seemed clear but half a second later my helmet pinged as a piece of who-knows-what hit it at something approaching eight-hundred feet per second. It wasn’t going to do anything bad to my armor, but it brought back unpleasant memories of boot camp and waking up to the infamous clanging of the metal trash can lid. One thing was sure, Fred would last thirty seconds out there.

  I had no doubt that I could take out the Ollies that were firing at us. My Stark’s AI had calculated that there were six of them based on the angle of the incoming fire. The problem was two of them had an angle on Fred. If I left him, there was a good chance, he would be toast before he could talk me through anything. If I took him with me, he would be toast before I got him to the control panel about one hundred meters away.

  I could not think for the life of me why the Ollies were firing at us… unless they had gotten hold of meat. The only meat I had seen was dead Ollie. Even in the worst of times, I had never known Ollies to be cannibalistic.

  I was just thinking that I wished that I had time to call in reinforcements when I heard the distinctive sound of a Mark IX Marine-Grade high-power pointer ionizing the air. There is a sizzle that’s hard to replicate short of throwing a steak on a hot grill.

  I turned to peek at the door we had popped through a few minutes earlier. Corporals Matok and Peters were systematically sweeping the room. It was a thing of beauty. They were back to back… moving in a sideways crab walk. Peters
was a good foot shorter than the Ashtoreth but that just seemed to make him all the more diligent in protecting his partner’s back.

  “I thought I ordered everyone one back to the Defiant?” I said while firing my own pointer at a target of opportunity. It seemed there were more than six Ollies firing at us.

  “Well Sir,” Peters began to answer. “We’re both incorrigible miscreants that have trouble following orders.”

  “You said he would not court martial us,” MaTok said in an impossibly deep guttural voice. He was not using a translator. I was impressed.

  “Hey, I’m still hopeful,” Peters responded. “Besides,” he said as he took out another shooter, “I’ve been in the brig a number of times. It can be fun.”

  “I doubt the veracity of your statement,” MaTok grunted as he took out the last of the opposition.

  “That hurts Big Guy,” Peters said as he looked around hopefully for more targets.

  “Gentlemen, and I use the term loosely, your timing is impeccable. We need to jettison the fusion core and we only have minutes… if that to do so. Fred and I are going to work the controls. I need you to guard our six.”

  “Roger that, Sir,” they answered in unison.

  Chapter 21: Lord Fred…

  It took Fred several minutes to scan the control board. He had me plug a cable that extruded from a small door on his chassis into a receptacle on the control board. The wait felt like hours.

  I swear I could feel the radiation from the rapidly failing fusion core tickling my back. One of the great and unresolved flaws in the Stark suits… one that had propagated forward through every succeeding generation of the battle armor… was the inability to scratch one’s back.

  I think more Marines had died, removing their armor to rub their backs on a tree like a bear, than had ever died because the armor failed them.

  “OK, Commander. I’ve programmed the ejection sequence. The power to jettison the core will come from the remaining internal batteries. Many are offline or barely operational. It is likely they will be completely drained by the time we are done. We will need to restore power for life support as soon as we can.”

  “Understood. Energize or whatever you say to jettison the core.”

  Fred’s lights flashed briefly in acknowledgment. “Energizing now.”

  Instantly, the lights, gravity-plating and every other thing that blinked or dinged… stopped blinking and dinging. Two seconds later my comms lit up with Commander Hiller calling from the bridge of the Defiant.

  “Sir, did you just light up a firecracker about twenty klicks off our port?”

  “I didn’t get to watch… was it pretty.”

  “Very impressive, Sir.”

  ***

  Six hours later we had essential systems back online with portable power plants. Fred helped us isolate the power feeds to Processing Unit Zero-One-Six. We, essentially, had control of a Fabricator starship. That said, what we really had on our hands was a mess. I had Commander Hiller and Lieutenant Robison head up the team extracting the data core and getting the information back to the Yorktown.

  I, however, had a thornier problem to deal with. Apparently, a member of my team was dealing with delusions of Godhood.

  When we finally rounded up all of the Ollies, there were one hundred and forty-two of them. From what we could tell, they were all that had survived from an original support crew of over four hundred.

  When the Great Disruption caused the twenty original Fabricator ships to fall out of hyperspace some three hundred years ago, all of the Ashtoreth crew and most of the Ollies had died due to the massive accompanying surge of radiation.

  On this one, sole, solitary ship, sixteen of the original Ollies had been working in a section of shielded conduit when the emergence event had occurred.

  Over the course of several generations, their numbers grew to over six hundred. At the same time, the Ollies which had been the engineers and technical staff, lost most of the knowledge needed to run systems on the ship that they had been entrusted to care for.

  Eventually, only the Primary Crew Interface Module for Processing Unit Zero-One-Six serviced and maintained the life support systems. Unfortunately, those systems had never been intended to operate for several centuries. Entropy took its inevitable toll and system after system ceased to operate.

  About forty years ago, even the PCIM suffered a catastrophic failure. Its last words to the surviving Ollies were ‘need parts’. As they had come to worship the PCIM, the Ollies took the request as an order issued from on high.

  They began to disassemble the very systems they needed to survive. It was this activity that caused Zero-One-Six to suffer a catastrophic failure when it was attacked in the Aldebra system. It also resulted in the slow poisoning death of most of the Ollie survivors.

  Those survivors faced many challenges. All were sick. All were malnourished. All suffered from genetic abnormalities resulting from excessive inbreeding. Perhaps most troubling, each and every one of them thought that Fred was the reincarnation of their PCIM god.

  I sent a team of recovery Marines on a special mission. The original surviving Ollies had had the foresight to store the cadavers of their fallen comrades in a section of the ship that they depressurized. The vacuum of space mummified the bodies, and perhaps more importantly, preserved samples of their DNA. It was also in this section of the ship that the remaining replicators sat unused and in pristine condition for centuries.

  WhimPy-101 would be able to use the DNA samples to repair and diversify the genetic material of the survivors. With enough training and medical attention, there was a good chance that the extinct Ollie race could be brought back.

  The data core was being analyzed by WhimPy-101 and the Yorktown AI. I hoped we were going to find something useful because the massive Fabricator fleet was on Earth’s doorstep and it was far more powerful than anything we had yet faced.

  ***

  Fred used the replicators that were still functioning to bring Zero-One-Six’s original PCIM back online. The unit had suffered a massive memory core corruption and we were forced to replace its entire memory module. With Fred’s permission we cloned his data core and essentially cloned Fred.

  The new PCIM began the process of systematically restoring the environmental systems on the Fabricator ship. I left two engineers, a xenobiologist and a med-tech behind to aid in the recovery efforts. We were going to leave the Ollies on the Fabricator ship. There was no way I was going to take the last of their kind into a potential battle.

  Admiral Kimbridge had agreed and had requested the Hupenstanii send a delegation to meet with the Ollies and find then a new home world. As they had lived onboard ship for generations, they would need quite a bit of help establishing a world-based society.

  I spent some time talking with the Ollie leader, ShinZu. It took a few hours for our AI’s to fully adjust for the centuries of semantic drift that had occurred. It turned out that the Ollies had been an advanced race that had travelled from their home galaxy to the Milky Way a millennium ago. It was this experience that had caused the Ashtoreth High Command to include Ollie engineers on their invasion ships.

  ShinZu confirmed that the original intent of the invasion fleet was to punish and eradicate the Ashtoreth pretenders to the throne. Their crimes in their home galaxy were apparently heinous in the extreme.

  When I spoke of the massive Fabricator fleet approaching Earth, the Ollie became very agitated. He brought me to a special room that seemed to be setup as some type of shrine. It held two very old books. One was handwritten. This was the book the Ollie leader seemed anxious that I should look at. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read the Ollie script, so I asked ShinZu if he could read me a small section.

  He nodded and opened the book to a section that he called The Counting. It was here that I learned the original fleet was composed of twenty massive ships. Nineteen were like the one I was currently on. One was different. It was designated Zero-One. Zero-One was unique in tha
t it alone had the ability to repair and replace damaged vessels. In essence, it was the Fabricator’s fabrication ship. Reading between the lines, I realized this ship was also likely the flagship.

  WhimPy’s analysis of the captured data core had revealed a hierarchical command structure that seemed centered on a single command ship. It had to be Zero-One. This had to be the key to defeating the Fabricator fleet. Any good soldier knows that if you have a chance to take out the enemy’s command structure… the battle is almost won.

  It was this simple reason that caused armies to stop saluting in the field and to wear subdued rank identifiers. Nothing spoils an officer’s day like getting shot by the enemy because he knew you were the head honcho.

  I pointed to the other book. I asked him what that book was. He told me it was the Book of the Way and the Truth and the Life. It had not been read by anyone in a very long time. It spoke of a loving Creator and a need to care for others. I told him we had a similar book and it was held in high regard by many people. I shared that many of the peoples we had encountered had a similar sense of the divine.

  ShinZu nodded and told me that the Creator had abandoned them, and they had been cast out of the heavenly void. This was why no one read the book any more. It was not right for them to see the words of the Creator when they had so displeased the Creator.

  I asked him if he had any children. He told me he had two sons that still lived. I asked if he loved them. He made a very human-like chuckling sound. He loved them dearly… even when they tested his patience… which seemed to be every day.

  I pointed to the unopened book. If the Creator loves you like you love your sons… would he not want you to read the Book of Life?

  ***

  The trip back to the Yorktown was longer than I would have liked. The ever-growing damping field extended into a region of space we needed to cross. Fortunately, the area was already well populated with Ring-Gates. We made use of two of them to reach sector 1-1-3.

  It felt good to walk the familiar decks of the Yorktown. It felt even better to get the opportunity to finish some unfinished business with a certain doctor I had left in the lurch as it were.