by Mark Wandrey
Lilith disengaged with the damaged T'Chillen cruiser and swept around, pushing the Kaatan hard to close the distance as the Mok-Tok fighters dumped a flurry of missiles into the hulking transport. Its shields flashed out like exploding lightbulbs one after another until a pair of the missiles swept in unopposed to detonate against the hull of the transport.
Two blew gaping holes in a pair of the spherical hull modules, one amazingly slid through the superstructure without impacting anything, and the last one hit the central needle-like spine of the ship. The explosion tore the ship in half, the forward cluster of balls arced away from the rear section that stayed mainly on course.
“No, damn it!” Lilith screamed as she raced to intercept. The distance was too much. The fighters were now coming around, preparing to go for the kill. The larger rear section of the Ibeen was still under power, but appeared uncontrolled.
Pip was not responding to her hails. Her heart fell in agony as she realized she was about to watch her entire family die.
Her sensors warned of another ship as it suddenly decelerated into the midst of the combat box. She was about to employ weapons against it, then stopped. It hadn’t dropped out of supra-luminal speed, it had arrived via a tactical jump!
The new ship was huge by any standard. Easily as big as a T’Chillen dreadnought in length, though not nearly as wide of beam. She instantly recognized most of the components. The central hub of an Ibeen, with drive and a huge power plant amidships. Instead of big cargo balls, it carried two dozen Kaatan class vessels. They were wider and thicker, but still unmistakably Kaatan.
As Lilith watched, six of these ‘super Kaatan’, as she was thinking of them, disengaged from the mother ship and instantly set upon the Mok-Tok fighters. In only moments they swept the sky clean of the fighters in a blaze of energy weapons.
The carrier changed vectors and pushed away from the star, making a run for a light speed getaway. And like that it was over. The super Kaatan re-docked, another tactical portal appeared and the big ship was gone before she even thought to try and contact it.
Lilith came about, looking for the T’Chillen cruiser to finish it off just as that ship unleashed a swarm of decoy beacons. In an instant, she was almost blind.
“What was that all about?” she wondered, as she sat in shock in the dark aftermath of the battle. Part of her mind worked to look for the enemy as she considered developments. Who else had access to the technology of the People? Now she better understood how her mom felt.
Chapter 52
May 12th, 534 AE
Unidentified Star System, Contested Territory, Galactic Frontier
Minu struggled upwards towards consciousness from the soft, dark deep. Her head bumped against something hard and she pried her eyes open. Dim blue light was cast from intermittent glowing panels along the hallway that she drifted in, her foot this time grazing against a reinforcing strut.
What the hell am I doing here? she wondered through the fog. A hand went to her head and came away covered in clumpy congealed blood. It was pooled near her hairline like a large disgusting bubble. She wondered how long she’d been unconscious. A quick check of her chronometer showed about five hours.
“Pip,” she croaked, “where the fuck are you?” There was no answer.
She reached out at the next support she saw and arrested her motion. Not even the slightest hint of gravity presented itself once she was stable. No air movement either. She bared her teeth in anger and dismay. The Ibeen was obviously a total loss if there wasn’t even power to run the life support.
She checked her combat gear. There was a small mask and re-breather that would keep her alive for at least eight hours, providing the atmosphere remained. If she was desperate, maybe fifteen minutes in vacuum. But she’d be blind and nearly helpless, forced to close her eyes and curl into a ball to avoid as much damage as possible to her body from exposure.
With a shiver of apprehension, she removed the life support headpiece and clipped it to a loop on her battle harness, near her head, before looking around.
Minu fixed her position as at least a dozen meters down a hallway from the improvised CIC where she’d been trying to prod Pip into action. She took an extra moment to take stock of her situation, using a trauma pad to soak up the blood on her head and feel the wound.
A cut, not too deep, led from above her left ear to nearly her eyebrow. It hurt though using a little mirror from her kit she saw only red flesh, and not bone. She slapped a pair of advanced wound closure tabs, making a face at the sting of the adhesive in the wound, and called it good.
Her shoulder was sore and she still hurt from the beating she’d taken in the battle suit on Planet K, otherwise nothing else appeared broken. So Minu eyed the hall, set a foot, and launched back towards the CIC.
Years of visiting Lilith in her ship had gotten her used to some zero gravity maneuvers. It was fun to play in occasionally, not to mention some of the things she and Aaron had done from time to time without gravity.
Her heart contracted at the thought of her love, somewhere on the stricken ship. Was he still alive, or did his corpse spin frozen in space? She shook her head to clear the thought, and immediately regretted it as pain exploded from the gash.
She stopped herself with one hand at a hallway junction just short of the CIC. Glancing both ways her jaw tightened. A few meters away floated a body, one of her Rangers. His head was at an unnatural angle and bright red frothy blood slowly dripped away from his mouth where he floated. She moved on, knowing there would be many more.
The door to the CIC was open, another sign of the amount of trauma the ship suffered. Automated systems should have closed the doors immediately after explosion, or whatever had happened. She nervously checked an instrument on her kit, still plenty of oxygen. Inside there was no sign of Pip.
Minu activated the little crystalline communicator. “Lilith, are you there?”
“Mother!” her daughter almost cried, “are you well?”
“I’m hurt, but alive. The ship must be a mess.”
“The Mok-Tok fighters attacked when I was distracted, they essentially destroyed the ship.”
“Oh no, how bad?”
“A third of the structure destroyed. The main superstructure is split at the fifth junction. You are in the rear section where I constructed the CIC, not from the ship’s engines. It is the smaller surviving section.”
“What about everyone else? All the Rangers…” she took a little breath and continued, “your father, Cherise and Gregg?”
“The majority of the Rangers have survived, including your husband.”
Oh thank you, thank you, Minu thought to whoever might be listening.
“I do not know the whereabouts of Cherise. There are about one hundred unaccounted for and likely lost in the balls that were destroyed. Father is in the Phoenix shuttle helping with the other shuttles to modify the larger surviving section’s course enough to bring it into orbit around one of the larger asteroids in this system.”
Minu gave a little sigh thinking about Cherise, hoping she was alive and not looking forward to a conversation that would follow. “Excellent report. What about my part of the ship?”
There was a longer pause than Minu would consider healthy. “I cannot currently locate your section of the ship.”
“Why not?”
“The T’Chillen cruiser is still in the system and has deployed ECM drones to blind my sensors. These are devices of Tog design, and I did not expect them to have access to this technology.”
“Me neither.” Minu chewed her lip. Did that mean the Tog were allied with the T’Chillen? She shook her head, almost laughing at the thought. The snakes loathed humanity’s protectors; there was absolutely no chance of an alliance there. “You had a pretty good description of this part of the ship, how did you manage that if you can’t find us?”
“Images of the Ibeen’s breakup. I was forced to dedicate all my resources to save the larger section or it would hav
e impacted a large asteroid cluster and been destroyed. I believe your section impacted at least one smaller asteroid, or perhaps used its engines once or twice because it is not on the vector it last had upon the breakup. During rescue here, I lost track of you.” Another pause. “I am sorry mother, maybe I should have saved you first.”
“No,” Minu said instantly. “There are thousands of soldiers on that other part of the ship. No, you did exactly the right thing. I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you.” She didn’t sound very happy.
Minu was at least glad her daughter was growing into her emotions, even if the girl didn’t often know how to express them appropriately.
“You also need to know an unidentified faction intervened and destroyed the Mok-Tok fighters before they could finish your ship off.”
“What?” Minu gasped. Lilith described the ship for her.
“Any idea who owned it?” she asked when her daughter was done.
“No clue, I’m sorry.”
“Okay, we’ll deal with that later. Maybe we have an unknown friend? For now back to the current problem. How many Rangers should have been in this section?”
“If additional damage was not extensive, only a hundred or less. Part of one company assigned to a section just behind the main weapons impact. They may not have survived though.”
“I understand. You said this is the engineering section, so maybe I can restore power and navigation?”
“The systems are redundant. That may well be possible. Pip can assist you.”
“Yeah, about that.” Minu explained the events of the last few moments of battle to her daughter. “So I don’t know where he is, or what sort of mental state he is in.”
“No doubt unstable. Being linked to the ship appears to have deteriorated his mental condition.”
“I don’t know how much more he can deteriorate and remain human, at this point.”
“You have to consider the possibility that he may be dangerous, mother.”
Minu considered that for a moment. That the diminutive Pip, once considered to be her lover, would be dangerous to a fully trained Chosen was, at first, laughable. Then she thought about the technical prowess held in that mind. No-one on board would know the ship better than him. Was he even then setting some sort of trap for her, or trying to escape the doomed ship? Damn him.
“I’ll silence that howler when I hear it. For now, keep up the efforts with Aaron and start to formulate a plan to first keep everyone still alive in that state, and then get us out of this system.”
“We are working on that. Kal’at is working with a PCR to determine the nearest Portal and work on an evacuation plan. Once the ship section is safe, I am coming for you.”
“No,” she snapped, “you are not to do that. Do not leave the survivors unprotected with the snake cruiser out there. We look like a hulk, and I doubt they would be interested in us at any length. You working with that section would be all the encouragement they would need to attack. Is the Kaatan okay?”
“I have sustained minor damage, and it is being repaired. Power reserves are around fifty percent, but consumables are below twenty percent. I used far too many missiles.”
“Better that than the alternative. Okay, as I ordered, protect the survivors. I’ll find who I can here, evaluate our options, and get back to you in one hour.”
“Very well. And mom, please be careful.”
Minu ended the call and took a breath while considered her next moves. The unknown Kaatan carrier was concerning. Why hadn’t they at least identified themselves to Lilith? Secret friends were almost as bad as secret enemies. Especially when you had no idea what they would do next. Oh well, she had never been one to dwell on things and let angst control her. She shook her head and let it go for now.
* * *
The hour was almost up, and Minu had made some good progress. She’d found Third Platoon of Charlie Company, Beta Battalion holed up in a cargo module next to her own. They only had three injured although five of their number were dead and two more with the main injured group elsewhere. That still left thirty-eight soldiers up and moving. Organizing them by squad, she sent them out to give a report on what parts of their shattered ship were accessible.
Minu took the CIC as her command center and used her last tablet to establish a battlespace. The program, designed by Ted Hurt, was capable of three dimensional projections as easily as a static groundside theater and quickly assembled a view for her of the ship.
It was ugly. The ship had once been a string of six clusters of five balls, fifteen hundred meters long around a cylindrical central shaft. The drive was a cluster of gravitic drives in the aft. Now the ship was cut in half just in front of the sixth and last cluster of balls.
Each ball was a large cargo module, some containing ships systems and other equipment or docking bays. In their case, three of the five were still intact, the two others were holed. Her men reported that they could see dozens of bodies inside of one ball. The other was nearly torn in half and only a few corpses could be seen. She decided this platoon were the only survivors.
The engineering section was sealed off, the doors closed and not responding to the keypad. Minu drifted to the rear of the ship until coming to the access point and examined the system. A touch of her finger brought up the usual matrix of interwoven icons.
The special place in the back of her mind itched in a way she could never scratch and codes danced through her fingers. The matrix pulsed blue in reply.
“It’s locked on the other side,” she said aloud for the technical corporal who was floating next to her.
“What does that mean, ma’am?”
“It means I’ve found Pip.”
Chapter 53
May 12th, 534 AE
Unidentified Star System, Contested Territory, Galactic Frontier
Pip didn’t know how he had gotten to engineering or even how long he’d been working on the ship’s system. He’d isolated the command and control system so no-one else could even turn on a light without his say so, and when he’d noticed someone at the access to the little engineering bay he’d locked out the doorway from the inside so thoroughly he didn’t think it could ever be opened again.
Still, slowly, he came to his panicked senses enough to see that he’d been working to bring the ship’s engines back on line. Well, that was good.
But the main defensive grid was completely destroyed, and it would be all but impossible to maneuver the behemoth, even less than half a behemoth, without shields, so he’d simply begun to enter protocols to jettison all of the cargo balls, leaving only the truncated spine and engine cluster. It was then that he came back to his senses, only moments from the fateful decision.
“Pip, I know you are in there,” came Minu’s voice over the intercom. He thought he’d jammed those too. Apparently the special codes given to her by the Weavers could do more than he thought. Could she break through and open the doors? His hands moved of their own accord towards the initiator to eject the cargo modules. He jerked his hand back as if it was burned. The Weavers. He shuddered and looked at the monitor.
Minu floated there in zero gravity, a Ranger technical corporal and a pair of privates, all carrying beamcasters and shock rifles floated behind her.
“Hello boss.”
“Am I still your boss? What are you doing in there?”
“Working.”
“Working on what?”
“Things.”
Minu looked away and he could see the frustration on her face. Frustration and a nasty gouge on the side of her head. His face burned red with embarrassment when he thought about what he’d done, or not done hours ago.
“We’re in deep shit here, Pip, and I need your help.”
“I can’t help.”
“Fine, than get out of there and let us help ourselves.”
“I can’t do that either,” he whispered. “I want to go home.”
“We all do, Pip. So let’s work together to
make that happen.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand.” Another Ranger floated up, this one a sergeant. He leaned close and whispered something in her ear, possibly suggesting a way to gain entrance to the little engineering bay. Minu shook her head and turned back to the camera. “Explain it to me.”
“You will want me to fight, to put myself in danger. I can’t do that.”
“You’re in danger just being out here,” she reminded him.
“I know, that’s why I’m going home.”
“How Pip, the ship is fucked. The shambling mounds blew it in half while you were freaking out.”
“The others?”
“Most survived,” she said and Pip looked away. “A lot didn’t. But that’s not anything to talk about now. I need you to open this door so we can work to get this thing under control before it crashes into something else.”
Pip nodded to himself. She couldn’t get in. There was nothing they could do to stop him. The initiate key glowed there, only centimeters away. One touch and they’d all be gone, and he could use the remaining power to get to a Portal. He’d be home in only a few hours! And he’d never leave the planet, ever again.
He imagined Minu’s corpse floating, frozen and bloated in zero gravity. What would Lilith do when she found out? Fear stopped him. Always fear.
The ships nominal surviving sensors informed him of a nearby object. An asteroid? In sudden fear he increased power to the pair of surviving sensor arrays. If an asteroid was in their path he would have only seconds. But no, this was on a similar trajectory to theirs. In fact it was matching their course and velocity precisely. Only it was getting closer, meter by meter closer.