The Harbinger

by Graham Leslie

  “Maneuver beginning in ten seconds. Brace,” Ops instructs. I tighten the straps on my chair. Several of the exterior scopes are damaged, but I pull up the forward-facing scopes that are still alive on the holographic display, showing the forward view of the ship with some black gaps.

  The maneuver begins. The airjets on the top of the Riyadh begin blasting at full force and the vessel begins to slow. Once again we have some semblance of gravity as I’m pulled towards the ceiling. My arms drift up and my hair stands up on the top of my head. The sudden change gives me nausea, but the reminder of gravity is comforting. They Riyadh creaks and groans as g-forces compress the ship while the airjets slow her hulking mass. If I wasn’t so used to the groans of this old ship, I’d be nervous. I remember my first night on this rust-bucket, pushing off from space dock in the orbit of Ganymede, after a mere hour walkthrough by the Al Harbi pit boss. If I had any questions, Ops would be happy to answer them, he said. Ha, ha. I’m not sure I slept the first night, the ship creaking under the stress of the burn from Ganymede with a full cargo deck, agents droning around the ship —

  A priority message arrives on tight beam, catching my attention:

  LARGE VESSEL TRAILING YOUR AFT. PLEASE IDENTIFY. REMINDER THAT LOCAL AUTHORITIES ARE INBOUND.

  Oh no, no, no, no.

  It’s been right behind us. The whole time, as I was re-aligning the solar array, as I was in air tank storage, it’s been right there, using us as cover.

  “Ops, bring up aft view.”

  “Aft scopes inoperable.”

  “Bring up all operable scopes with a full field-of-view,” I instruct. The holographic display expands the view to about two hundred degrees of patchwork field-of-view where we have coverage from working scopes. The vessel approaching is in a blind spot. I know exactly what it is, but I really want to be proven wrong. I wait to see it. As we slow, it should be passing us and visible on the display. Long, arduous moments pass. Then a hulking shape comes in to view. The Harbinger. The ship has been directly behind us, in the scopes’ dead-zone. From that distance, it must have looked as if we were one big ship. Now they must think we’re pirates springing a trap.

  I can’t shake my focus from the display. The Harbinger, in her twisted glory, burns hard at the Watney, accelerating from its hiding spot. The Riyadh rattles under the ion-stream from the Harbinger. The Watney is not far, I can see her without zoom on the display. She begins to burn to evade the coming threat, but it’s too late to get away. Suddenly, the lights in the Ops deck begin to flicker. The holographic display begins to wash out in white. I feel uneasy, very uneasy. Then I watch in horror.

  The Harbinger is shrouded in black, a strange black aura that’s somehow impossible to see, but defines her from the black of space. I’ve never seen anything like it. The Watney is turning to evade, but suddenly lurches as if on a string tugged by the celestial gods. The craft is thrown off in a different direction, spinning along multiple axes. Hardware from the exterior of the ship shears off and is launched in every direction. This must be what happened to me.

  Suddenly, a massive fireball races out of the ship and bulkhead is blown out into space.

  Oh, god.

  Bodies are ejected like missiles from the craft. Ports slam shut automatically, isolating the decks affected by decompression. The fire dissipates, but sparks and flashes of light illuminate the ship. Then, an incredible explosion. The Watney is immediately enveloped in an incredible, iridescent fireball.

  I clench the arms of my chair, anticipating the shrapnel from the vessel to impact, but nothing comes.

  “Radiation spike detected,” Ops warns me. Good god, their fusion reactor breached. The entire ship was just slagged into molten gas.

  The fireball begins to fade away. It’s horrifying - the fusion reactors are protected by so many redundant safety measures, they shouldn’t breach like that. Hell, when ours was hit by the agent, it managed to shut itself down in time and vent the plasma to prevent any kind of damage.

  My attention is brought back to the Harbinger. I can only hope it only wanted to use my ship as cover.

  “Navigation, train the scopes on the Harbinger.” The scopes zoom out, pan to the Harbinger, then zoom back in. She’s covered some distance from her hard burn towards the Watney, but — no. She’s flip-turned and is coming back, burning hard right towards me. The lights begin to flicker once more. I feel the uneasiness wash over me and the panic set in. The holographic display begins to grow brighter, then brighter, washing out bright white. I clench the armrests once again and shut my eyes. I’m clenching so hard my hands are hurting. I can see the white light of the display through the pink of my eyelids. Then it suddenly stops. The display is back to normal. The lights are steady.

  I open my eyes, and see the Harbinger rotating up, presumably to flip-turn again. Then, an alert from Communications. We received a short-range broadcast sent to all vessels in the area. I have Communications bring it up.

  THIS IS THE NERO FAMILY DESTROYER BLINDING LIGHT, IN FORMATION WITH THE FRIGATE COMMANDING TRUTH. YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF NERO LAW. POWER DOWN AND COME TO A FULL STOP AND PREPARE TO BE BORDED, OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON.

  Chapter 7

  I watch helplessly as the destroyer and frigate blast forward, burning at high speed. The Harbinger has rotated to face the intruders and burns hard, accelerating to meet them. All parties menacingly approach each other at their full speed. At this distance, there’s no point in firing weapons at each other. Close range chain guns would have enough time to track and chew up any approaching missile, and a ship would have just enough time to evade an incoming rail gun round. The vessels simply burn hard, their crew anxious to meet and battle. The Nero crafts blast out a second warning, indicating that they are ready for combat.

  Holy shit, this is about to go down.

  The destroyer is equipped with a belly-mounted rail gun. These weapons are scary effective — the super-accelerated tungsten slug will be ejected from the magnetic weapons platform so fast it will tear clean through the hull of any ship and out the other side. Military vessels are built to protect against these types of weapons - redundant Ops decks, redundant air tanks, redundant ion drives, fusion reactors placed in different locations on every ship to prevent a targeted rail gun round and reactor breach.

  The Nero craft begin to separate from their formation, and the destroyer burns ahead of the frigate. It looks like they’ll attempt to pass the Harbinger on either side in a slanted formation, and make the space between them the kill zone.

  This should be an extremely lopsided battle, but I’m not sure the Nero family trains their naval crews for battle with enemies that can bend gravity.

  I realize my knuckles are white from gripping the armrests so hard since I watched the Watney vaporize. This whole event has been insane. I don’t know what the hell is going on anymore - I’m seeing snow in space and imaginary Earthers are throwing around my agents. I’m not sure I can even trust myself right now. I should probably just lock myself in one of the soil containers that are most likely floating around the cargo deck in a cloud of dirt with some protein bars and water until we reach rescue. That is, if the thing in the red spacesuit doesn’t decide to tear my ship in half.

  My attention is drawn back to the display.

  It’s starting.

  The Blinding Light fires its airjets to pivot and face the Harbinger as it barrels forward under the thrust of its ion jets. The rail gun that runs the length of the belly of the destroyer unleashes a heavy tungsten round at two thousand five hundred meters-per-second. The slug tears through space towards the Harbinger.

  At the last moment, almost immediately before the slug’s calamitous impact into the Harbinger, I watch as the laws of physics are broken before my eyes.

  The tungsten round, a slug powered by pure kinetic energy with no maneuvering systems of its own, changes course. It arcs, flying past the Harbinger, and rips away into space. It’s unbelievable. The amount of force it would t
ake to change the trajectory of that slug so quickly is mind-bending. I can picture the cacophony on the Ops deck of the Blinding Light as the crew tries to figure out what the hell just happened to their rail gun round. They haven’t yet seen what the Harbinger is capable of.

  The Blinding Light fires its airjets once more to correct to a course running parallel to the course of the Harbinger. The Commanding Truth continues along its original path behind, but parallel to the Blinding Light. The Harbinger accelerates still. The rail gun will need time to recharge the capacitors powering the electromagnets, but the ships are nearing the effective range for their missiles.

  I zoom the scopes trained on the Blinding Light. I see the surface ports hiding the missiles open. And then, glorious fire erupts. The missiles are unleashed from their cages, hungry for prey. The Nero commander isn’t messing around, he launched a massive salvo, apparently offended by the missed rail gun slug. The missiles speed ahead towards their target. At the last moment, a majority of the missiles miss their mark under the same bizarre force that moved the rail gun round, but a few impact the Harbinger. The damage is colossal. With its ragged outer hull offering no protection, some of the missiles managed to detonate inside the hull of the Harbinger, blowing debris into a cloud around the ship. The smoke, fire, and debris trail away from the Harbinger, and the two vessels fly pass their prey. With most foes, a rail gun and missiles make you a god of the void. But this is no ordinary foe. And with that thought, all hell breaks loose.

  The Blinding Light and Commanding Truth, having passed their damaged prey, are suddenly halted dead in their tracks. From a full burn, these hulking mammoths of steel are brought to a full stop. The Riyadh’s scopes have a hard time tracking the ships; all the assumptions Navigation knows about leading the paths of the ships are broken. The scopes zoom out, reacquire their targets, and zoom back in.

  I can’t imagine the scene inside these ships. Stopping from a full burn like that will utterly destroy a human body that’s not strapped in to a chair, and maybe one that is. The carnage inside must be ungodly. And yet, the ships are fully intact. Unlike what the Harbinger did to the Riyadh and the Watney, I see no damage on exterior of the Nero vessels.

  The smoke clears, and I feel the pit in my stomach. The Harbinger’s ion drive and airjets are all silent, damaged and disabled by the missile salvo, bit the tattered ship is still relatively intact. It drifts slowly, turning to face the Nero vessels.

  “Ops, give me a close up of the Ops deck on the Harbinger.”

  Once again, I see the figure in the red spacesuit. Entombed in the skeleton of the ragged ship, it faces down his prey as I watch from far behind. The creature stands in plain sight on the exposed Ops deck, pulled to the scarred metal floor like it has its own gravity despite the Harbinger no longer being under thrust. Debris drift around the ship as arcs of electricity and bursts of spark illuminate the dead ship. Then I see some flash from outside the frame.

  “Zoom back out.”

  I see the two Nero vessels. The Commanding Truth let go of its salvo of missiles to finish off its target. The missiles trail across the distance between the two vessels but they pass the Harbinger and continue past.

  Oh, no.

  They cross the short distance from the Harbinger to the Blinding Light. The command of the Blinding Light didn’t have time to order reprogramming his ship’s chain guns to attack their own Nero missiles. About half of the missiles impact the Blinding Light while the other half race past. The destroyer is savagely torn in half. Explosive decompression feeds an enormous blast as the two halves of the vessel separate from each other, and are then engulfed in destruction as secondary explosions and extinguish any chance of survival onboard.

  The other half of the missiles trail a long arc past the Blinding Light, circle around, and scream back. I’ve never seen anything like this. They accelerate continuously until they impact the vessel from which they launched. The Commanding Truth is shredded by the impact of its own munitions as its precious air blasts out into the void, then the ship is reduced to slag.

  Hundreds of crew members just died aboard those two ships, expert crew that had cut their teeth in skirmishes against the other families of the Jovian moons, all at the hands of a civilian vessel with a single crew member and no weapons.

  And like that, it’s once again just the cold void between me and the Harbinger.

  Chapter 8

  The Harbinger is near death. The ship has no propulsion, not even airjets after the damage it took from the battle. But yet, moving under an inexplicable force and shrouded by the black aura, the Harbinger is moving towards the Riyadh. The creature aboard is coming for my ship.

  “Ops! Keep the docking port shut!” I yell, but Ops tells me the shipboard network is offline and can’t communicate with any agents. My foe has somehow taken down the ship’s network as he closes on its prey. I’m frozen in terror waiting to meet the inevitable.

  The Harbinger makes contact with the Riyadh. The Ops display prompts me to engage the docking clamps and open the docking port, and then just displays docking, as if something else accepted the request for me.

  I need to get off this ship.

  The emergency EVA port is nearby at the head of the Spine outside the Ops port, but there are no space suits at that port. I’m supposed to leave one in my quarters for emergencies, but they smell so I keep them all at the normal EVA port at the midsection. I need to head down to get a suit, then I can make my escape through the standard EVA port. Problem is, the suits are hanging just opposite the docking port, separated by the Spine. There’s no way I’m taking the Spine. I’ve seen what terror the Harbinger brings, and I don’t want to meet its passenger.

  I need to take the cargo decks. I’ll make my way through access panels, dropping through the cargo decks until I reach the deck with the EVA port. I’ll get a suit on, pop out the door, and let this bastard take the ship and get out of here. Then I’ll either be rescued, or at least I’ll die under my own will.

  I unlatch from the Ops chair just as the lighting begins to flicker. Once more, the holographic display washes out with bright white light, but this time shorts out and disappears for good.

  It’s here.

  Time to go. I push off from the Ops chair and open the port into the corridor. All clear for now. I push off and drift across the corridor until I reach the Spine and the open access panel. I grab an oh-shit handle before passing the edge of the access panel and peek over. All clear — for now. I pivot and drop through, but quickly push off towards the back side of the craft, into a cargo deck. Once clear of my quick slant across the Spine, I grab an oh-shit handle on the cargo deck and swing around, my eyes fixed from where I came.

  I breath heavily, waiting, not moving a centimeter, scanning for threats.

  No movement.

  No movement.

  Get up.

  I turn around and push off again, headed for the back of this cargo deck where I’ll find the access panel to begin dropping through each cargo deck.

  The air is getting cold around me.

  I fly across the open deck. The little cargo on the ship will all be in the decks closer to the midpoint, so it’s closer to the docking port where cargo is loaded in and out in zero-g. I reach the first access panel and stop myself above it. The panel, like the Spine elevator access panel, likely hasn’t been opened in years. I grab the latch and slowly lift it up until I have it on angle enough to turn. Then, I rotate the latch. It turns through grime and grease. Luckily, the muck is silencing any noise and working in my favor. The latch rotates through its full range of motion, and I use it to prop open the access panel without a sound. First panel done. I let go and it holds in place, and I drop through to the second deck.

  It’s much colder.

  Directly beneath, I reach the second deck’s access panel. I want to make sure the coast is still clear. On these empty decks, I’m in plain sight from the Spine. I need to move quickly, but I spare a moment to turn and lo
ok.

  There’s snow falling up the Spine, towards Ops. Nope, bad idea.

  I turn back to what I’m doing. Need to focus. Don’t get side-tracked. You’re going to get out of here.

  I grab the latch and lift it up. It’s very cold and harder to move, but still, I can turn it with my good arm and shoulder. I carefully move it the full range of rotation, then I swing the panel open and push through, dropping down to the third cargo deck.

  It’s freezing now.

  This panel is frozen. I grab the latch but it’s immobilized. Shit. Don’t look at the Spine. If it sees me, I’m dead anyway. I wrap my hands around the fulcrum of the latch and cup them around it to generate heat. I feel water inside my hands. The ice is melting.

  Come on. Melt faster. I’m starting to shiver.

  I can’t resist a passing glance at the Spine.

  Shit. Movement. A shadow up the Spine, casted between it and some light source below.

  Faster. Faster. Come on.

  My hypothalamus kicks in. Not now, not now. Damn it. I begin sweating like crazy. My heart rate is really picking up. Need to give it a try.

  I give the latch a pull, but nothing gives. I put my hands back around the fulcrum.

  Melt faster! Come on!

  I hear something below. Slow, heavy footsteps. Metal on metal.

  My god, come on. Come. On!

  I grab the latch once again, and pull. I put all my strength into it. A shearing pain down my shoulder as the glue splits. The warmth of blood on my back.

  The latch gives and turns up with a shriek. Shit. No time to worry.

  Move!

  I wildly swing open the access panel and drop through. This is the last panel.