by Nick Webb
And ugly. Faces that bore a striking resemblance to what he imagined the offspring of a crocodile with a human baby-like face who’d had sex with a tortoise would look like, except the offspring had contracted leprosy, been badly burned, and beaten with a spiked club, and whose now open wounds had developed gangrene and only semi-dried.
That kind of ugly.
“Well. That seals the deal for me,” Volz began. He turned back to Lieutenant Whitehorse and her tactical crew. “They’ve all got to die. Just on looks alone. Kill it with fire, lieutenant.”
They were coming up on another battery of guns, all of which started to fire on Zivic in his fighter up ahead. Whitehorse nodded. “With pleasure, sir.” She motioned for her tactical crew to begin targeting the guns, and take them out.
The Independence’s array of sixteen mag-rail guns lashed out and made quick work of the Swarm turrets. And before long they were on to the next one.
“Cap’n, Admiral Oppenheimer showed up with the Earth Defense Fleet. And Ido is here. The other two ships are no longer pointing their weapon spires down toward Britannia.”
“Where are they all pointed?”
“Straight at Ido. It’s taking quite the beating. But he’s dishing it out as well as he takes it.”
He, presumably referring to Granger. As if he could be in two, or twelve, places at once. Lieutenant Qwerty had been one of the officers who’d accepted the whole “Granger returning as thirteen-billion year old conquering hero” storyline without much questioning. How the hell any human could live thirteen billion years, much less survive the fall past the event horizon of a black hole, was beyond him.
But Shelby accepted it. As did Qwerty, Ensign Riisa, and half the bridge crew. Lieutenant Whitehorse, their chief scientist Commander Mumford, and Ethan were the ones who thought as he did, that the whole thing was nonsense.
And yet Bolivar’s moon, Ido, was out there right now, having been converted into a giant cannon by … something. And that something was now pummeling three Swarm ships, each of which was individually more powerful than the entire Swarm fleet thirty years ago.
“How’s Ido doing?”
Qwerty shook his head. “Detecting fluctuations in the radiation levels coming from its core. The Swarm beams are penetrating pretty deeply. Almost halfway through the mantle. Whatever power network has been … installed there is getting ripped to shreds.”
“No other moons are here?”
“Not yet,” said Qwerty.
Whitehorse added, “And now this Swarm ship is rotating again to point its primary weapons spire down at Britannia. We’ve got less than two minutes.”
Volz pointed up at the screen. “Just in time. We’re at the end of the road. Call Batshit back in and let’s blow this joint. Riisa, have q-jump coordinates ready. Jerusha? Is our package ready?”
Another one of their cobbled-together anti-matter packages, this one strapped to the top of a standard fighter thruster with a rudimentary guidance system.
“Cargo bay reports ready.”
“Zivic in yet?”
Whitehorse shook her head. “Um … no. He’s … shit.”
“What?”
“He’s not responding.” She tapped a few buttons on the console. “Life signs are there, he’s just not responding.”
Volz stood up and searched the screen for his son’s fighter. “Did he take damage?”
“Some. But his systems are operating just fine. He’s flying straight towards the main power generator just ahead.” Whitehorse threw the image up on the screen and they all watched as Zivic’s fighter, dwarfed by the massive generator in the distance, blazed straight ahead, disregarding their hails.
“What in god’s name does he think he’s doing?”
Chapter Ten
Bridge
ISS Defiance
Sector 21-K
“Do they see us yet?” Proctor rushed over to Lieutenant Case’s console and glanced over the readout.
“Not sure yet, ma’am.”
She scrolled through the ship diagnostics, shoving him out of the way—no time for social niceties. “Thank god. The stealth system is intact. But what the hell are those bastards doing all the way in here? They usually don’t dare enter a system with an IDF listening post.”
Lieutenant Davenport shrugged. “They probably figure IDF is preoccupied at the moment.”
“And they’d be correct. But why here?”
“Well, ma’am,” began Lieutenant Case. “Apologies, but … there is a bounty on your head. Word is Admiral Oppenheimer and President Sepulveda are pulling out all the stops to bring you in. A buddy told me that he heard from his brother who’s married to a girl with a smuggler cousin that the bounty is over fifty million alive.”
“Fifty? I’m flattered.” She paused. “And dead?”
“Twenty million.”
Her mind was racing. Britannia was under attack by three Swarm ships. Her own ship was almost completely useless—all ten q-field generators were blown out and the power plant was one wrong move away from another meltdown. And she was about to be kidnapped by pirates.
“Ok. We can do this. Case? Engage the stealth. Please tell me at least that is still working.”
“Yes, ma’am. And … yes, ma’am.” His fingers deftly entered the commands perfectly, as if he’d been rehearsing that one.
“Davenport? What’s our weapons status? Under normal circumstances we’d make quick work of them. What about now?”
He shook his head. “Just one out of eight mag-rails are functional. And even that one is only at one tenth power. It’ll dent them good, but won’t penetrate.”
“It’ll have to do. I’ll be on the hull. Follow my lead.” She started to run back out the bridge’s exit before her still-tender ankle reminded her that was a questionable activity. So she speed-limped.
“Ma’am? You’re not seriously going out there,” said Case.
She didn’t even look back. “Questioning your commanding officer, lieutenant? Is that how they do things in the marines?”
His face went from white to beet red. “No, ma’am.”
“Follow my lead,” she repeated as the door closed behind her. Her plan was … risky, to say the least. But it had the virtue of being the only plan that she had the time to come up with on the fly.
She made a quick stop on deck four at the general maintenance bay. Luckily, Admiral Tigre’s people had organized the place quite efficiently and she located the replacement q-field generators in a storage bin near the back wall. With some trepidation, she peered inside. What were the chances that they’d prepared themselves for all ten blowing out at once? Usually a ship would only need to replace one or two per year.
There were at least twenty. “Miguelito, you’re a life-saver. Rest in peace.” She shoved ten of them into a bag she found hanging on the wall, snatched a standard toolkit from another locker, then limped as fast as she could out the door and down to the airlock, struggling under the weight of the heavy bag.
It was a task that one of the marines could be doing—it wasn’t terribly complicated. But it would have taken a good hour to instruct one of them in the finer points of q-field generator replacement. There were right ways and wrong ways, and the finicky little bastards had any number of issues that a first year cadet would know about, but a marine? They were trained for killing the enemy as efficiently as possible, not for starship maintenance.
She pulled on the space suit as quickly as her ankle would allow, and when she was ready she stood at the airlock controls, her hand hovering over the release. “Bridge, everything ready?”
“As ready as we can be without knowing what you’re up to, admiral.”
“Just listen in and you’ll know what to do. We need to assume this channel is not secure—low-life like this tend to have access to decryption methods they shouldn’t. Any change of status with the pirates?”
“None. They’re scanning the area that Titan was in. Which means they knew where it
was, and where we would be if we weren’t stealthed.”
She nodded. “So they probably caught a glimpse of us before we went dark. They know we’re here.” She pressed the release mechanism of the airlock and the atmosphere in the compartment evacuated as the outer hatch opened. As she walked out onto the ship she felt the artificial gravity disappear and the magnetic field of the boots on the space suit engage. Her feet comfortably clamped to the hull, she took a tentative step, then another, trying to remember her zero-g magnetic boot training. It had been over forty years….
“No change, ma’am,” came Case’s voice through her headset. “They didn’t detect the airlock opening or closing, and apparently can’t see you.”
“Well, I am on the opposite side of the ship from them. They’ll see me when I go replace the generators over there. Stay tuned.”
She wandered over the hull, thankful that the zero-g had rendered the heavy bag full of replacements a cinch to carry, but kicking herself that she hadn’t memorized the exact locations of the burned-out generators, since now that the hull was essentially a pitch black surface dotted with stars she struggled to locate them. Luckily her space-suit’s heads-up display marked them for her and she managed to switch out four of them before the trouble started.
“Admiral, incoming transmission from the pirates.”
“Patch them through to me.” She quickened her pace as she saw the other ship loom up over the invisible limb of the Defiance. It bristled with weapons. It even had a mag-rail turret. Under normal circumstances the Defiance could have made quick work of it, but now? It was deadly enough.
“Admiral Shelby Proctor,” came the voice, thick with an accent she couldn’t place. French? Mixed with back-country Bolivaran? “You look a tad vulnerable there. Out for a space walk?”
“Oh, you know,” she replied casually, and on her heads-up display she saw her next target just ten meters ahead. “Sometimes a gal’s just gotta get away from it all. Let her hair down. Go for walk. See the sights.”
“There are no sights here, admiral,” said the pirate, the dry humor lost on him. “And that I find interesting. We can sight absolutely nothing underneath you. It is as if you’re walking alone in deep space, against a surface that is either entirely in your head, or … entirely stealthed.”
So. They knew about IDF’s supposedly top-secret stealth technology. Though, in fairness, any casual observer of the events over Earth two weeks ago could have put it together. IDF most likely had done some behind-the-scenes damage control and convinced the news pundits to not speculate about it, but plenty of unregulated feeds no doubt had noticed, and were hatching wild conspiracy theories. Some of which were probably correct, given recent events. “Can’t hide anything from you, I suppose.”
“No, admiral, you can not. And if you value your life, you will not resist us when we bring you aboard our ship. We have something we’d … like to show you.”
It was either a prison cell or the business end of a gun. The bounty was a fortune, even if she was dead. “No, I don’t think I’ll be coming with you right now.” She bent over and released the manual locks on the next q-field generator. “In fact, I have a proposition for you.”
“Oh?”
She yanked the dead generator out and flung it into the black of space, then fished in her bag for the replacement, trying hard not to breath too loudly and give away that she was actually hard at work. They couldn’t know what she was doing or she was a goner.
“Leave now and I won’t kill you.”
The other end of the comm line erupted in several people laughing. It took them several moments to catch their breath, and then the first pirate resumed. “Oh, admiral. You’re in no position to make such demands. Prepare to be boarded. We may not be able to see your ship, but we can sure as hell see you.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t advise that. Because … oh, never mind.”
Could they be that stupid? All she needed was time—enough to replace five more generators, get inside the ship, and then they’d be on their way. And if she could just draw out the conversation for as long as humanly possible….
“Wait. What? Because what? What were you about to say?”
They were that stupid.
“Because… well, I’m not sure it will even matter. You’ve obviously made up your minds to earn that bounty. No sense in telling you about a much, much bigger—dammit, you know what? Forget it. Come on. Come get me.”
She could hear muffled arguing on the other end of the line. She was almost to the sixth generator. Four more after that and they were home free. Well, free to chase Titan to Britannia and help defend one of the centers of civilization from their greatest enemy, and probably die in the attempt. But freedom carried certain risks.
“Tell us. Now. Or we’ll just open fire. Would be interesting to see what a mag-rail slug would do to you.”
She chuckled. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that either. A mag-rail slug, even at lowest power, would turn me into a little red cloud. You see, the tungsten round, as it enters my skin, traveling as it is at a measurable fraction of the speed of light, will create a pressure wave of such high magnitude that as the wave passes through my body, the flesh will cavitate. You know what cavitation is, don’t you? It’s where the pressure drop is of such a degree as to vaporize the medium it is passing through. Vaporize, as in a phase change. Liquid to gas. Or in this case, solid flesh and liquid blood all to little cloud of gaseous Admiral Proctor. And you can’t redeem a bounty with a little red cloud, last time I checked.”
The pirate swore. “You’re stalling. That’s it. We’re coming to get you, and we’re not going to be gentle—”
“Ok, fine. I’ll tell you. You’ve heard about the bounty, yes. But what you should know is that I have some rather rich friends in high places. And I can assure you that … wait, hold on … there’s something in my boot. Dammit. I need to shake it into a better spot so I can stand up.”
It wasn’t a lie. Something had been caught near her ankle and now had slid down under her arch. But any way she could stall, she’d take. Luckily she’d stopped right next to the sixth generator, and used it for leverage to shake her boot.
“Admiral, are you trying to suggest to us that you can arrange a payment of a sum greater than fifty million?”
“Pft. Fifty? Try five hundred. That’s pocket change to these people, and they’d pay dearly not to have the companion to the hero of Earth taken into custody and tried for a murder she didn’t commit.” The object in her boot shifted, and she reengaged the magnetic lock to the hull. Twenty seconds later and she’d replaced that generator too.
Four left.
But she didn’t know how much longer she could stall.
And it looked like the stalling was in vain anyway. As she rounded one of the edges of the Defiance she caught sight of two space-suit-clad figures walking along the hull carrying assault rifles, which in short order were pointed straight at her.
Chapter Eleven
Fighter cockpit
Inside Swarm Vessel
Near Britannia
Drones. Automated ones, it looked like, since they were far too small to fit the grotesque beings he saw earlier. Zivic swore as one got close enough to strafe him with a stream of small caliber rounds. Not particularly damaging all on their own, but….
He peered ahead. There were thousands of them. Possibly tens of thousands. He wondered if the Independence could even visually see them, they were so small and the ship was so far behind him. And they were about to launch the package. Right into this cloud of drones, which would take the thing out prematurely. And they only had so many of those packages.
Time to do something stupid. His specialty.
“Zivic to bridge. Hold off on Bitch Slap Four. I’m going in solo. They’re smart enough to shoot down our package, but not smart enough to shoot down me.”
A sudden clang followed by an alarm told him he’d spoken prematurely.
“I stand by my assessment,” h
e added, seeing that the damage was only to his reserve oxygen tank. Didn’t need that anyway. “Bridge? Are you reading me? Come in.”
That’s when he finally glanced at his sensor monitor to his right and saw the short-range jamming field. And that’s when he understood.
“Bridge, this cloud of drones here must be some kind of automated defense system for their power core. They shoot down threats, and send out a jamming signal to interfere with any remote guidance of torpedoes. And … you can’t even hear me, can you?”
Half a dozen drones were closing in on his position, and he dove downward, swung wide, then gunned the engine straight towards what looked like could be the main power generator. At least, the gamma radiation coming off the immense structure was the higher than he’d ever seen from something that wasn’t a star.
“Ok, rad shielding, you do your job, and I’ll do mine. Please. See, I’m asking nicely.” He accelerated, checking the status of every torpedo, missile, and gun that his bird had. He prepped everything that could explode, and prepared to launch it all in quick succession, then get the hell out.
“Almost there….” He swung around a formation of about a hundred drones, and dove past a second. The two groups fired at him as he flew past, and ended up decimating each other. “Take that, you bastards.” Just a kilometer away. “Bridge, if you’re reading this, I sure hope you have those q-jump coordinates already worked out, because this thing is about to light up like Christmas.”
Something heavy collided with him, and he started to spin wildly. “Shit!” He grabbed the controls and tried desperately to right the bird, but the force of the spinning was beginning to make his vision sparkle with stars and fade at the periphery. “Mayday! I’m hit, and I can’t right her!”
He was spinning dizzyingly fast, but not fast enough so he couldn’t see the wall of the silk road looming up ahead of him, getting larger and larger with every turn.