by Alex Lamb
7.3: YUNUS
Yunus had barely clipped into his couch when the wave hit. It saved his life. The shuttle jolted as if smacked by a gigantic hand. Impact foam erupted around his body to prevent his neck from snapping. A roar like the end of the world filled the air, backed by a chorus of shrieking sirens. Yunus found himself spinning end-over-end. He squeezed his eyes shut and prepared to die.
To his astonishment, the roar slowly transformed into a wail. The tumbling stopped, replaced by a furious juddering. The sirens fell silent. When he opened his eyes, the view outside the shuttle on the screens showed a swirling nightmare of gritty darkness punctuated by explosions of lightning. The shuttle bucked wildly.
Yunus could only stare. What in God’s name had happened? Had someone dropped a nuke on them?
‘Brace yourselves, please,’ said Lisa calmly. ‘We have limited control. Landing is going to be rough.’
To Yunus’s astonishment, she was managing it. For all that he might not like their style, Yunus had to hand it to the Spatial Corps. Their troops weren’t fazed by anything.
‘This is Lisa Markus to Gulliver,’ she said over the comms. ‘Contact Shuttle One has experienced aileron damage. Currently attempting a thruster landing. Will commence repairs immediately upon grounding.’
Yunus’s terror came back, redoubled. A thruster landing in conditions like these? How was that even possible?
Lisa showed him. The shuttle jerked in mid-air. The storm became a bone-jarring shake and the shuttle dropped, leaving the pit of his stomach far above. Then it bounced horribly and fell again. Step by step, it lurched its way closer to the ground.
Impact with the desert made the hull ring like a bell and the ship immediately began to vibrate furiously. Yunus realised that they must have been travelling far faster than he’d imagined. The shuttle slewed sideways, metal shrieking, and slid for what felt to Yunus like an impossibly long time.
Suddenly everything stopped. Yunus became belatedly aware that the sirens had all started up again. He hadn’t noticed during the landing. Lisa cut them off, leaving only the sound of the ticking hull and the screaming sand outside.
‘Contact Shuttle One to Gulliver,’ Lisa said over the comms. ‘Are you still reading us?’
Yunus held his breath while he waited.
A faint reply made it through the lightning-swamped hellscape that Tiwanaku’s atmosphere had become.
‘This is Gulliver. We see and hear you, Contact Shuttle One,’ said the voice of Mark Ruiz. ‘Do not commence repairs. We are prepping Shuttle Two for your rescue.’
‘Fucking Fleeties,’ Lisa muttered under her breath. ‘That is not recommended, Gulliver,’ she said. ‘Conditions down here are extreme, and we have repairbots.’
‘Understood but overridden,’ said Mark. ‘Sending you data now.’
There was a pause from Lisa before she said anything more.
‘Oh, holy fuck,’ she whispered at last.
‘What?’ said Yunus. ‘What’s going on?’
She forwarded the information to his view.
It showed a surface scan from orbit. On one side was the atmospheric schematic of the antimatter event that had boiled the atmosphere. On the other was a close-up of their position. Bright points denoting several dozen vehicles had poured out of the nearest Photurian habitat nodes. All were converging on their site, despite the raging oblivion of the storm.
‘They’re coming for us,’ said Nico in a hushed voice. ‘The bastards are coming.’
7.4: WILL
Will cursed himself over and over. He never should have let things go this far.
‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Fuck this first-contact bullshit.’
He redeployed his subminds, tracking every single object as far out as geostationary orbit. Should one of them so much as move, they’d get a boser in the face. He reached for the comms channel Yunus had used to speak to the swarm. Sam was already on it.
‘Move away from that shuttle!’ Sam was telling the swarm. ‘That shuttle is ours. Aggression will not be tolerated. Retaliation will be total. Be aware that you are declaring war on an interstellar species!’
The Photurians didn’t appear to give a damn. Their vehicles kept closing in on the grounded shuttle.
‘Mark,’ said Will. ‘Don’t launch that second bird.’
‘We don’t have time for repairs,’ said Mark.
‘You don’t have time for a rescue, either. Photurian intercept is in six minutes. Even on full burn, your shuttle will need nine. You have to give me a clear shot.’
He swapped back to the comms. Sam was still there, repeating himself over and over, applying different weird filters and urgency warnings to his message as if it would make some kind of a difference.
Will drowned him out. ‘Get any closer to that shuttle and I’ll destroy you,’ he told the swarm.
The Photurians maintained their approach.
‘Hold on tight, everybody,’ Will told Nelson and his crew. ‘Things are about to get interesting.’
He fired eight g-rays at the surface on minimum strength, aiming for the Photurians closest to Yunus’s crash site.
Kilometres of desert turned to molten glass in a ring around the shuttle. Twenty-seven Photurian rovers vaporised. Weird, bright holes momentarily formed in the storm clouds as eight columns of atmosphere turned instantly to plasma. At the same time, Will aimed his primary boser at the largest orbital factory hub he could see and fired a microsecond shot. The factory hub popped like the devil’s own soap bubble, splashing the planet’s atmosphere with another wave of hideous thermal violence.
‘Do you get it now?’ he asked the swarm. ‘Leave our shuttle alone.’
The response was swift and, at first, curiously beautiful. In a ripple that raced out through in-system space, the aimless, drifting flight paths of the countless drones began to change. They shifted and realigned as if waking in unison from a shared dream. Then, in waves thousands strong, they dived towards the Ariel Two.
Will regarded them with alarm that melted rapidly to shivering anticipation. Aliens had taken from him his chance to have a family, his credibility and finally his wife. If he was honest with himself, he’d been waiting years to punch one in the face. Now, apparently, he was about to get his chance.
He opened up a channel to the Gulliver.
‘Mark,’ he said. ‘It’s all down to you now. This is why I brought you. You know what you have to do. Get those scientists out of here and keep them safe. Leave Yunus and these assholes to me.’
8: DISASTER
8.1: MARK
Mark sat mutely watching the madness play out while Sam raged at Will for taking over the comms.
‘Damn you, Monet!’ he yelled. ‘What have you done?’
Citra was dumbfounded. Then Will’s message came through for everyone to hear.
Mark’s chest tightened. A wash of guilty anxiety he hadn’t felt for years washed over him. His youth had been filled with Will’s speeches about protecting people. The story about Amy Ritter’s death had been drilled into him about a hundred times.
Do not expose your friends to danger, Will had always said. It is your duty to use your talents to help humankind. You have been given a gift and IPSO is counting on you to use it wisely.
Mark had heard it all. He’d never expected it to matter.
‘Everybody strap down,’ he told the team in the lounge. ‘We’re getting out of here and there may be some fancy flying.’
The Casimir-buffers fizzed into life. He greased the rails for warp and kept them humming. But instead of clipping in, Citra lurched up out of her couch.
‘No!’ she said. ‘We have to go back for Yunus!’
‘Not possible, I’m afraid,’ said Mark. ‘He’s in Will’s hands now.’
He brought up the positions of all the closest sw
arm drones, turned the ship and dived carefully for the largest gap between them. Citra bounced off the crash padding.
‘Strap in, please,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want you to get hurt.’
He put half of his submind attention on vector analysis and dumped as much neuro-accelerant into his bloodstream as he could without triggering epilepsy. The world rammed into high gear. He bounced and spun the ship simultaneously, nudging several cubic kilometres of elastoceramic alloy framework for the simple purpose of kicking Citra Chesterford back into her couch. He managed it almost perfectly. She cried out in pain and grabbed her arm as it hit the edge of her seat. She’d live. He piled on the gees to keep her there.
‘Venetia, you’re closest. Fasten her in, please. Now.’
Venetia leaned over fast as Citra cradled her elbow.
‘Mark, the shit has hit the fan,’ said Sam, his voice labouring against the sudden acceleration. ‘Yunus is gone, which leaves me in charge. I’m passing the captaincy to Ash. He has more flight hours on the Gulliver than you and right now we need that experience.’
‘Negative,’ said Mark coolly. He didn’t even bother getting angry. He had too much to think about. ‘I have my orders, and with respect, Ash can’t fly worth shit under combat conditions. Right now we need to leave and I’m already on it.’
Mark brought up the vector cloud, merged with it and swooped around as sixty drones headed towards them on different converging paths. Fortunately, their attention appeared to be on the Ariel Two rather than him, which made life easier. He watched the Ariel Two’s quantum shield shiver into life, coating the ship in silvery armour. He envied it.
The Ariel Two’s defences came online just in time. The drones burst harmlessly against it, flooding the planet below with blasts of poisonous light. The Gulliver’s Casimir-buffers smacked and crackled as the radiation waves hit.
Another two hundred and eleven drones lay dead ahead. Mark saw them charging for warp.
‘Shit,’ he muttered.
As soon as conventional acceleration wasn’t enough, the Gulliver was going to have real problems. The drones wouldn’t be able to go superlight this deep in-system but they’d still wreak havoc with his trajectory models. Mark bumped his vector-support allocation to seventy per cent and braced himself for the flying to get chewy.
‘Mark!’ Sam shouted. ‘This mission is now under military jurisdiction. Ash has been trained for alien-incursion events. You have not. Relinquish the helm.’
‘Back off!’ Mark yelled. ‘That is not standard procedure and I’m trying to concentrate!’
Suddenly, Mark’s grip on the ship wobbled. Security override flags popped up all over his display with Sam’s signature on them. They started vanishing as soon as they’d arrived but the ship’s systems didn’t recover as fast. Half the hull management SAPs went into forced reboot.
‘What the fuck?’ he shouted.
The ship’s engines cut out, waiting for the management circuits to re-engage. But the drones kept coming. Warp-light crackled around their hulls. Mark glared into the lounge camera. Sam looked astonished.
‘Ash,’ said Sam. ‘Do you have the helm?’
Mark rounded on Ash’s avatar. He was standing there looking dumbly at his hands, panic in his eyes.
‘N-no,’ said Ash. ‘I do not.’
‘Are you fucking insane?’ yelled Mark. ‘I don’t know what kind of shit you tried to pull there but that was some unbelievably bad timing.’
‘Mark,’ Ash breathed. He gathered himself together and practically squeaked. ‘Give me control!’ He started fumbling with the hull albedo subsystems, tinkering with them like a lunatic. Mark ditched Ash’s avatar, flicking it out of the helm-arena.
Ninety-seven drones hit warp, all dangerously close, and the Gulliver juddered backwards like a body peppered by bullets. Mark saw damage warnings from warp inducers and sensor arrays all over the hull erupting in the helm-space around him. A dozen different system management SAPs started keening at him simultaneously.
‘Holyfuckingshit!’ Mark yelled.
As they sat there helpless, the Ariel Two’s mighty g-ray banks opened up. Ninety-seven Photurian drones died simultaneously, sending another tidal wave of radiation smashing into the Gulliver’s side. Rad-management SAPs screamed at him as Casimir-buffer support dropped to twenty-one per cent. The Gulliver wasn’t built for this kind of abuse.
Mark backed some of his submind attention off vector analysis and threw it on emergency repair. Several hundred robots raced down tracks in the mesohull, prepping replacement inducer components even while they moved.
‘Sam, were you trying to get us killed?’ Mark shouted. ‘Do not touch those system controls again or God help me, I will break your neck if we don’t die first.’
‘You are in breach of your command chain!’ Sam shouted back. ‘I will have your interface rights revoked.’
By this time, Citra had recovered her wits.
‘We have to go back for Yunus,’ she announced. ‘Take us back. We have to get down there. As his wife, I’m ordering you.’
Mark ignored them both.
Citra unclipped from her couch again. With the engines down, her seat-lock had released.
‘Just give me the shuttle, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it myself!’ She headed for the hatch.
Mark’s engine control started coming back online and not a moment too soon. A new wave of seven hundred and nine drones had swerved towards the Ariel Two, with the Gulliver right in their path.
‘Will someone please restrain that woman,’ said Mark. ‘We have nine seconds. After that, the turns we need to take are likely to kill her.’
Venetia and Zoe responded as one, surging out of their couches. Zoe tackled Citra while Venetia flew to the wall where the emergency medkit sat. She yanked out a sedative, kicked off against the wall and flew back to where the two women tumbled in the air.
Citra was punching Zoe repeatedly on the back.
‘Let. Me. Go!’
Venetia slammed the sed-gun into Citra’s side. She grunted and flopped free. At the same moment, the engines sprang back into life. Mark brought the injector rails up to full power.
‘Hurry, please!’ he said. ‘We’re out of time.’
Venetia and Zoe dumped Citra’s unconscious body into the crash couch and clipped her in with frantic hands before diving back to their own seats. Mark applied the emergency straps. Zoe glared across at Sam, who hadn’t moved a muscle.
‘Thanks for all the help,’ she snarled.
Mark fired the warp guns, kicking everyone back into their seats. The thud of warp rose rapidly to a growl as Mark veered out of the path of the oncoming wave. Eight gravities of acceleration squeezed the air from their lungs.
As he skirted the edge of the wave, his warp envelope scraped those of the closest drones. They veered wildly off course, crashing into their neighbours in a cascade of searing blasts. Mark watched the explosions in his wake with mounting frustration. Whoever programmed these Photurian pilot SAPs had done a really shitty job.
‘I know everyone’s upset,’ said Mark, swapping to his virtual voice as his chest squeezed tight. ‘I wish there was something I could do for Yunus, but right now, everyone needs to back off and let me do my job! I will meet as many of your needs as I can.’
‘What are you talking about, Mark?’ Sam subvoked through gritted teeth. ‘We have just one need, and that’s for you to get off the fucking helm!’
Sam still didn’t think he could fly. Maybe the guy needed some gentle re-education.
‘Zoe,’ Mark said sweetly. ‘You wanted data on Photurian warp drones, did you not? Well, there’s now plenty of shrapnel we could collect. There may even be biosamples.’
She stared at the camera with terror in her eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Wait!’ said Sam. ‘Insubordination
is one thing. Don’t go adding to it with crazy. Take samples and you turn this ship into a target!’
Mark snorted. As if they weren’t one already. He threw his ship into a loop, dived around and between the waves of oncoming munitions and raced back the way he’d come, heading for the spinning debris field the cascade had created. At the same time, he dropped some very accelerated submind attention on the collection scoops.
With millisecond timing, Mark swapped the orientation of his warp envelope, smacking the ship’s gravity field flat in less than a second. The Gulliver’s hull squealed like a bag of pigs as rampant gravitational eddies raced through it. There were reasons why Fleet had banned this particular manoeuvre.
He slalomed back through the radioactive ruins in the drones’ wake on conventional velocity, siphoning up bits of smashed munitions while thruster-braking as hard as the drives would allow. He had to prevent the shrapnel from hitting so fast that it punched holes through the hull. Warning sirens competed with thunderous crashes in the mesohull as the remnants piled up in the backs of the scoop buffers.
‘There we go,’ said Mark as the Gulliver hurtled out of the other side of the debris field. ‘Nice and easy. Plenty of research material for everyone.’ He’d like to have seen Ash try that one. Ideally from a safe distance.
Unfortunately, the trick had dropped his conventional velocity and dumped him in the patch of curvon-depleted dead space behind the drone wave. The timing wasn’t optimal as another wave of drones had powered up to drive straight through them. This time, the drones numbered in the thousands. His target identification SAP started whimpering.
Mark muttered to himself. He should have spotted them gearing up. He’d spread his attention too thin. Sam let out an incoherent yell as he caught sight of the oncoming wave.
Mark threw power to the thrusters, pushing them way beyond tolerances and guessed which direction would have the cleanest space.
Fortunately, he guessed right. The warp engines kicked back in, giving him just a fraction of a second’s clearance as the next wave of drones surged past to detonate themselves against the Ariel Two’s titanic defences.