Alpha Fleet (Rebel Fleet Series Book 3)

by B. V. Larson

  Already, secondaries and point-defense cannons were going off all over the ship. As the primary gunner, Mia was by no means our only gunner. She coordinated the fire of all the ship’s weaponry.

  Mia’s people were uniquely qualified as gunners, as they possessed a greater killer instinct than humans did, coupled with faster reflexes. The truth was, she was only truly happy when she was in the middle of a hunt.

  “Are we getting any hits?” I asked.

  “The probes show the target is still moving closer and intact,” Chang pointed out. “We haven’t stopped it yet.”

  It was strange to be battling such a tiny opponent with entirely unknown capabilities—no, strange was the wrong word. It was frightening.

  “Keep firing,” I ordered. “It’s small, and we don’t have it pinpointed. We’ll have to get lucky. Still nothing on radar?”

  Chang shook his head. “It’s not registering. Active sensors are all telling us there’s nothing there.”

  Another minute passed. The ship shuddered and rumbled as guns fired into the dark. We were throwing a great deal of ordnance downrange, but hitting nothing.

  I stabbed the intercom button. “Dr. Abrams to the bridge!”

  He contacted me via my sym instead.

  “What’s the problem now?”

  “I’d say it’s the same problem, Doc. We can’t seem to hit this bogey. You’re detection equipment must be faulty.”

  “Hmm…” he said. “That’s almost impossible. But I don’t blame you for the confusion. The enemy must have countermeasures.”

  “What kind of countermeasures can a gravity-propelled basketball have?” I demanded in exasperation.

  “We have to assume it was built by a technically advanced people. They’ve obviously built subsystems to defeat our relatively primitive technology.”

  “All right then… so the target is fooling us as to its exact location. We’ll lay down a pattern of fire.”

  Before I could relay the order to Mia, she was already on it. Instead of pouring away beams and kinetic rounds down a narrow shaft of space, she spread it all out. She peppered the region with explosives too.

  “Ah,” Abrams exclaimed.

  “What? What?”

  “Look at your display, Captain. The object has shifted its influence.”

  “Did we hit it?”

  “Either that, or it’s dodging. A third possibility is that it’s continuing on in a straight line, but the deception system that’s giving us a false reading decided to pretend it’s shifting course. That might indicate were getting close.”

  “Which one is it?” I demanded in exasperation.

  “I really don’t know. It’s your call, Captain.”

  Taking about three seconds to think about it, I turned to Mia. “Go back to your original pattern. The one you were using right before it seemed to move.”

  She looked baffled for a second.

  “It’s hiding, Mia. It’s a trick. Shoot the area of space that scared it.”

  She got that, and her field of fire went back to a previous pattern. She widened her cone of fire slightly, and I understood that. As the target got closer, it’s range of possible locations was widening too. Fortunately, it was going to be hard for it to hide if we’d guessed right.

  “Contact Captain Verr again,” I ordered. “Tell him his ship is under attack.”

  “I’ve been trying, sir—no response.”

  “Damn…”

  We watched for another tense minute. The target—whatever it was—kept getting closer.

  Suddenly, I felt a tug. It was slight, but it was undeniable. I swayed on my feet.

  “Was that the enemy—thing?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Abrams asked from near at hand.

  I turned to see him standing at my side. He was studying the situation with a gleam in his eye.

  “It’s within range of Devilfish now. I have several new theories concerning its methodology—just conjecture, of course.”

  “Give me your best one.”

  “All right… I think their ‘engine’ reaches out to objects of significant mass. By falling toward them, it’s able to propel itself in the direction it wishes.”

  “But wouldn’t that mean it would crash into the first thing it got near?”

  “No, as it seems to be able to control what gravity source it is magnifying. Like a mythical ape swinging on vines from tree to tree, it lets go of one support and grasps another. In between, it coasts on a steady trajectory until the next viable target gets close enough.”

  “That’s all very interesting… but it seems overly complex. Why not just use a rocket jet and go where you want?”

  He flipped up a single long finger like a flag. “Ah-ha! There, you have stumbled like a drunk onto the intriguing point. What advantages does such a system have? One, it doesn’t leave a plume and so is therefore difficult to detect. Two—”

  “Captain!” shouted Chang.

  I looked up, my eyes swiveling to the holoprojector.

  What I saw there made my mind glass-over. I didn’t hear Abrams any longer.

  An expanding cloud was growing in an uneven spheroid shape on the far side of the Terrapinian ship. In comparison, Captain Verr’s ship looked small.

  The probe, ship, weapon—whatever it was—had exploded.

  =32=

  The region of released energy grew with great rapidity. Without an atmosphere to block it, the expanding field became a blob a thousand kilometers wide in a second.

  “We’re dead,” Dalton said in a bleak voice.

  No one argued with him. No one had time.

  Samson was working his board in a frenzy. He shuttered every port, camera pod and hatch with shielding. Even Mia’s weapons were shut down and enclosed in rolling clamshells.

  Mia whirled on him, snarling, but he took no heed. His job was defensive coordination. Over the years, he’d come to take his role to heart, and I’d learned to trust him.

  When push came to shove, survival of the ship won out. Mia would have to wait to sate her bloodlust on her distant prey—besides which, it appeared to me that she’d already nailed the thing she’d been targeting. Either that, or it had calculated it was close enough and gone off like a bomb.

  Sampson’s controls overrode every other panel on the ship when it came right down to it. He’d taken over, and I hadn’t even given him the order to do so—there just wasn’t time.

  “Hull battened down—brace for impact!” he announced, his voice rolling out of every speaker on the ship.

  Everywhere, crewmen scrambled for a safe berth. Most of them had already been at their battle stations, but now they took cover, assuming the worst.

  Everyone struggled during the final moments with their breathing apparatus and suit-seals. It was probably futile. All of us were fated to die or survive the following seconds, regardless of what we did, but it was human instinct to try to determine our own destinies.

  Dalton buckled himself in with a crisscross of smart straps. Dr. Abrams landed his tail on a fold-down jump seat and stuck his skinny arms through the loops—there was no time to buckle it securely.

  “I didn’t think the plasma cloud could reach so far…” I heard him say aloud with puzzlement.

  For my own part, I did nothing. I stood on my feet, staring at the globe of shifting energy and particles as they first swept over the Terrapinian ship, then touched ours.

  I was knocked from my arrogant feet before the antigravity kicked in, at which point I began floating.

  That respite only lasted for a moment. The ship lost power, and when the antigravity died we were all thrown around. I quickly wished I hadn’t made a brave front of standing firm on my deck. I was thrown high, then low. I learned what a mouse might feel like in a washing machine. Devilfish was tumbling in space.

  From the moment the bogey had detonated until Devilfish was knocked out had taken perhaps twenty seconds. There had been so little time to react.

  The
ship righted itself violently when the power flickered back on. Her autostabilizers had kicked in with a vengeance.

  Getting up and suppressing an urge to vomit, I groaned aloud. Forcing my numb fingers to grasp anything I could reach, I crawled toward the soft webbing of my seat. It felt like a featherbed compared to the hard bulkheads and decking.

  Samson was up with an emergency kit. He swept me up like a baby and cinched me into my chair. Straps snaked over my sweating body.

  “Are you broken up, Captain?” he asked.

  “Uh… not too bad,” I lied.

  He nodded, looking me over critically. He lowered his big head and his voice.

  “You should have buckled up, sir,” he said.

  “I think you’re right.”

  Chuckling, he walked off to check on others. Casualty reports began rolling in. Engineering had been hit the worst. There’d been a chemical spill—something radioactive. The main hold was venting, the seals had blown. There was more, but my eyes were blurry.

  Mia came to put her hot hands on me.

  “You stood proudly on your deck,” she said. “A Ral Captain would have done the same. Don’t listen to these tree-people, Leo. Honor is all that matters. Everyone aboard ship will be talking about your stand by the end of this hour.”

  I wondered if she was right. I also wondered if I was going to get any nursing from her—but I didn’t. She wasn’t that kind of girl.

  Mia went right back to her gunnery station and unlimbered her weapons again with relish.

  “Stabilize this bitch, Dalton!” she shouted. “We’re still locked in a slow roll. I need a solid deck to fire from.”

  “Working on it, she-devil.”

  My crew was operating the ship without me. I felt like my bell had been rung. My thoughts weren’t confused, exactly—but they were fuzzy. I found it difficult to speak, so I just sat back and breathed deeply for a minute with my eyes closed.

  A heavy hand landed on my shoulder what seemed to be a moment later, making me wince. I looked up and saw the concerned, craggy face of Commander Hagen.

  “May I relieve you, Captain?” he asked. “You’ve been on the bridge for two shifts straight.”

  I thought about telling him no. I almost sat up stubbornly, holding in my guts with one hand—but then I relented.

  “All right. Have someone carry my ass to sick bay.”

  Commander Hagen immediately took command, shouting for orderlies. I was hauled away like a sack of grain.

  Hours passed, and countless medical procedures, salves and slathered tickling nanites did their magic. I woke up tired but functional.

  Groaning as I struggled up onto one elbow, I found there was only a single human watching over me. It wasn’t Mia, or Hagen, or Samson—it was Commander Hagen’s hand-picked pilot, Lt. Rousseau.

  Blinking at her with bleary eyes, I made a croaking sound. After a moment’s effort, I cleared my throat.

  “Lieutenant? How long have I been in the morgue?”

  “About six hours, Captain.”

  “Did Hagen send you down here to check on me?”

  She hesitated. “I… I wanted to see how you were doing.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied reflexively, and I tried to get up. I failed and almost fell on the floor.

  “Captain,” she said, “you’re not in any condition to—”

  “Help me into my uniform—that’s an order.”

  Rousseau complied. A few minutes later I managed to stand up, swaying only slightly.

  I leaned on her heavily, and she grunted and strained. She wasn’t very big.

  “I’m okay,” I said, lifting my arm from her shoulder.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah… I’m good. Let’s keep moving, or I might stiffen up.”

  Further progress down the passage way hurt a lot, but my pride was involved now. I couldn’t let this girl see how bad I felt. I walked unaided—with a limp, sure—but I walked.

  When the hatch opened, Commander Hagen was clearly surprised to see me. He didn’t look angry, but he might have been a little disappointed.

  “You were in a bad way, Captain,” he said.

  “Yeah… but I always heal fast.”

  “Captain on the bridge!” he announced. “Captain has the watch!”

  He backed off from the command station, and I took over. Slowly, painfully, I settled into the chair.

  “Any change? Any more shots out of the dark? Maybe we should get out of here…”

  “Funny you should mention that, Captain,” Dr. Abrams said from behind me.

  I glanced back at him. “Hold on a moment, Abrams.” My attention shifted back at Hagen. “Something happened?”

  Hagen shrugged. “No sir. Not really. We’ve been hanging out here in space wondering what hit us and whether there’s anyone left alive on the Terrapinian ship.”

  My eyes roved over the holoprojector. Captain Verr’s ship was still there. It looked like it had weathered that last attack better than we had, despite the fact it had been closer to the detonation point.

  “Play back the sensor readings of the blast,” I ordered.

  Chang was gone, and the new sensor man had one leg in a tube-like cast. But he seemed functional enough. “Playing the file, Captain.”

  We watched as the explosion swept outward with alarming speed. There was nothing we could have done.

  But the vid did show that the Terrapinian ship wasn’t flipped over and spun around like a bug in hurricane. It drifted and rolled, but it didn’t utterly lose its grip.

  “Maybe they’ve got better stabilizers than we do,” Hagen speculated.

  “Or maybe…” I said, “maybe they knew this attack was coming. Maybe they knew a way to avoid the effects, or at least mitigate them. Maybe we were playing the part of the fool in this story. We thought we were saving them, but we might have been duped.”

  Dr. Abrams cleared his throat loudly. I glanced at him again.

  “Do you have some sort of speculation to make, Doc?”

  “Speculation? That’s offensive. I hypothesize on the basis of available data. I never speculate.”

  “All right, whatever. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  He made a puffing sound. “I will share with you those elements of my thoughts which you might comprehend.”

  “That’s mighty big of you, Doc.”

  “Just so. I believe something else is here. Something lurks… Something which fired that weapons system in our direction.”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Have you detected any other vessels?”

  “No.”

  “What leads you to believe this dense ball of matter wasn’t just a mine, or a sophisticated drone, left behind here to destroy us?”

  “That is a strong hypothesis,” he admitted, “but I’ve rejected it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a second device, similar to the first, has been found. Several others lurk as well. We are, in effect, surrounded.”

  Glancing around at my crew, I saw they looked just as shocked as I did.

  “And when were you going to share this finding with me?” Commander Hagen demanded.

  “I thought it inappropriate,” Abrams said in a huffy tone. “You aren’t the captain, and you never suggested we should leave the area. As there was no immediate danger, I worked to confirm my data—and I’ve just completed my analysis.”

  We all looked at him. “And…?” I prompted.

  “Well… I was right. All along. We are surrounded by devices similar to the one that struck our ship six hours ago. There’s a globe of them stationed at about a million kilometers out in every direction.”

  “How many?” I asked, with my heart sinking.

  Dr. Abrams took control of the holoprojector, and the sensory officer grumbled. I shook my head at him.

  The display came to life. Hundreds of dots like red stars appeared all around our position.

  “There are approximately six thousand devices
,” he said. “The exact count is difficult to make, as I’m using inferred data rather than empirical evidence. We can’t ‘see’ these objects, or pinpoint them with active detection systems such as radar. Only our gravimeters, used in a coordinated array, have been able to pinpoint them and count them.”

  He sounded pleased with himself, like any academic displaying a successful experiment to his colleagues. He droned on, explaining his methodology at length and praising his own cleverness with every sentence.

  The rest of us, however, were feeling differently. We were glum and stunned.

  We were trapped in a small pocket of space. The big question in my mind was: who had done this?

  =33=

  “The answer has to be aboard the Terrapinian ship,” I told them, interrupting Abrams’ long-winded speech. The truth was, I hadn’t heard anything the scientist had said for at least a full minute.

  “Answer?” Abrams said. “What answer?”

  “The answer as to who is behind this. What’s the purpose? How can we get out?”

  He made a puffing sound again.

  “Such conceit,” he said. “There’s only one way to get out. We must form a rift and jump.”

  I slewed around painfully in my chair to look at him.

  “Really?” I demanded. “That’s your answer?”

  “I thought it was obvious from the start. There’s no other way.”

  “We’ll scatter. We scattered badly before on a short jump. You’ll fly us off to nowhere. Getting back will be almost impossible, because we’ll just scatter again.”

  “We don’t know that. One anomalous test—”

  “Is all you’re going to get, Doc. Think about it. Last time, the only way we made it back to the Solar System was by going through the same rift we’d just created. If we do that again today, we’ll be right back here in this mousetrap.”

  Abrams looked sour. “Perhaps we should report back to Earth Command and see what they say about this.”

  “I’ve been making hourly reports,” Commander Hagen said. “They know we’re in uncharted waters. They’re letting us call the shots—but with that said, leaving the star system would be a big step. We’d have to ask Vega—”