by Isaac Stone
INFERNO STATION
(Helltroopers Book 1)
By Isaac Stone
Contributions by Timothy Mayer
Copyright 2017 Isaac Stone
CANTO: Introduction
In the early 1300’s a man named Dante Alighieri crafted his masterwork, in the form of a narrative poem Divine Comedy, detailing an exhaustive journey through the Inferno, Purgatory, and Heavenly realms. The Helltroopers trilogy is a sci-fi remix of this mighty work, and follows a squad of space marines and a mysterious android as they take the harrowing journey through those reimagined realms. The novels remain faithful to Dante’s work, and so be warned that they do not follow the typical narrative structure one might expect from an average story, but instead adhere to the structure of the original Divine Comedy.
Strap on your power armor and get ready to fight like hell.
1
“Pirate ship is close enough for you to capture,” the disembodied head told Ash. “All you have to do is show us is proof the kill and you’ll get your fee deposited right away.” The head was transparent, as the projection unit had issues that day.
Ash Wednesday was strapped into the forward module of the gunship Thelema. They were twelve days out of the Calisto Port when the call came in from the EAC Corporation. His crew had been getting restless and he was glad they had something to go after for the first time in months. With the new corporate-sponsored fleet patrolling the populated sections of the asteroid belt, it was difficult to get the better jobs. Last year they’d only had four or five jobs and that hardly paid the bills. He knew his crew was getting soft over the lack of prey. They lived for these moments and he could see what the boredom did to everyone.
But it was over for now. They had a mission.
Two standard day cycles ago, his contact at EAC had sent them a message. One of the larger ore ships had been raided by a small team of pirates. This wasn’t the old-fashioned type of pirate who would seize a star liner and steal all the valuables from the passengers at gunpoint, this new bunch went after much bigger prey. They wanted the ore for some reason and hit a freighter that had very little in the way of defense. The crew was overpowered easily, but the first mate did manage to send out a distress call at the last minute before the pirates battered down the door to the control center.
Ash brought the diagram of the pirate ship up for everyone to see. Although his crew members were strapped into their chairs, they could turn and see the diagram as it rotated through the center of the cabin. The corporate contact head floated around it, flickering in and out of visibility as the faulty machine struggled along.
“Looks like they patched this one out of spare parts,” Ash told the head. “Not too bad, I see some new sections attached to it. Guess you now know what happened to those passenger ships that disappeared last year. Are they inside the ore freighter living space?” He aimed his hand at an empty space and the image of the compromised ore freighter appeared next to the pirate ship.
“We assume the crew of the freighter were jettisoned, likely after being shot,” the head told him. “Re-take our vessel, eliminate any pirate presence on board, and destroy their ship.” The head turned to look at the freighter image.
It was huge compared to the small image of the pirate ship. But size wasn’t that important in the void of interplanetary space where a much small vehicle could tow a bigger one along provided there was sufficient power.
“I assume we aren’t the only freelancers you contacted,” Ash told him. The head turned and looked at him.
“You’re the closest,” it said, “and the best. The other lancers aren’t as reliable. But, yes, we need proof to file the insurance claim. So all you need to do is slag the pirate ship and bring back a piece of it that can give a clean ID. Our recovery team will handle the ore ship once the threat is eliminated. Think you can accomplish that?”
“No problem, we will advise you when it’s done,” Ash replied. “That is one big ore ship and the pirates can use it for cover, it will take some fancy flying. Anything else?”
“Don’t damage the ore ship,” the head told him.
It looked stern.
“I won’t.”
“I mean it, Ash. Not like the last time.”
He grinned up at the head. “Don’t worry; we won’t crack the hull and vent the ship to suck out the pirates this time. Your people can handle the ore ship however you want. You have my word.”
“Fine. Let me know when the job is finished.” The head faded out.
He turned back and looked at his crew. “You heard that? No damage to the ore freighter.” Everyone nodded.
“But the pirate ship is still fair game?” Ester Sontag, who handled the finances for the crew, asked him.
“It is,” he responded and winked one blue eye. “We have to keep one piece for the claims board.”
“It won’t be a big piece,” Jack replied. Jack Lantern was the brains behind the cybernetic systems on the gunship.
“It doesn’t have to be,” Ash told him. “Just enough they can identify.” He slid back down in his chair as Makulah began the sequence to fire up the main engines.
After twenty-four hours of one-gravity acceleration, they managed to reach the zone in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter where the ore freighter was located. The diminutive pirate ship had a series of cables attached from it to the other ship. The massive freighter, which dwarfed the smaller one, moved slowly in the direction of the eventual destination of the pirates, no doubt another sleazy refinery outside the lunar colonies.
The pirates never saw them approach. One pulse from the EMP weapons on the Thelema took out their electronics. The salvo of small bomblets they unleashed next destroyed what remained of the pirate’s main fuselage. In two minutes, the pirate ship broke apart into the pieces used to make it. Ash watched on the monitors as the fragments floated by his field of vision.
Easy money when you own a gunship.
It wasn’t necessary for Ash or any of his crew to go out and retrieve a piece of the pirate ship. They waited until a small section floated by, made sure its atomic structure was registered on the index of stolen vessels, and grabbed it with a remote armature. Everyone in Team Omega, his private security company, floated around the main view screens and watched the piece be hauled into the airlock. Once inside, Ash had it safely stored away for future reference. They’d need it to be paid on the return to port.
“Ash,” Kris Tannerbaum called out to him as he watched the armature retract into the air lock. “We have a signal that looks like it came from that pirate ship. Looks to be on an EAC coded line.” Kris looked tall for a woman who’d been born on Earth as she bent over the transmitter next to the weapons array.
“Coded?” he asked. “Did you say an EAC code?” The only people who were supposed to have access to those were the corporate security officers and contractors. The corporation changed them every month.
“You want me to run it through the cracker?” Jack asked him. “We’ll find out what it’s about in a few minutes.” The cracker was the coded program system the corporation sent along with them every time they left on a new mission.
“Do it,” Ash snapped, as he rubbed his sandy hair. “We need to find out what this is about. Jesus Christ, please don’t let there have been someone important on that ship now that we’ve made it full of holes.” This was the last thing he needed. There was a lot of money owed to the port authority.
“Well, they didn’t tell us anything about anyone of importance on that thing,” Pete Costa chimed in. “And they did mention everyone on the freighter was assumed to be dead.”
“Mistakes happen,” Ash groaned as he
floated over to the cracker. “And the corporation will use it as an excuse to delay paying us if we smoked somebody important.” He watched as words formed in the air above him in tandem with the voice that spoke them, something in the voice having triggered the auto-translater.
“Greetings, Thelema,” the words said. “You have eliminated the threat as per contract terms. Please stand by for my transfer. You don’t have to do anything, just open the air lock when I approach. Shall I transmit my personal information so you don’t have to worry about my identification?”
“Corporation already did it,” Jack observed as he held onto a handle on the hull. “And it appears legitimate. Guess we have to wait for them to come over.”
“At least we don’t have to haul any one out of that mess,” Makulah Hatch responded. “It’s a waste of good power cutting those things open.” He was one of the new members of the crew and originally came from the southern part of the African continent.
They watched as the owner of the voice floated over from the ruined pirate ship.
The entire crew stared at the screen. A very lovely, red-haired, fair skin woman left the burst fuselage and drifted up to them. She held a small compressed air tool to guide and give direction. The woman wore a long dress, which drifted around her in the vacuum of space. Ash was told about angels in the outer belt, but, until this very moment, he never believed those stories. And this angel was very beautiful and had green eyes. He brought her image up as a projection over their heads so everyone could get a good look at her. She drifted barefoot up to the gunship Thelema.
“She’s an android,” Theo Pani spoke up. “A good one if she can cross space without any kind of environmental suit, means the body filling out that dress is one hundred percent synth.” Theo was one of Ash’s original crew and went back a long way with him.
It wasn’t long before she entered the main body of the gunship. Most of the work area was in a common space where they could plan out whatever needed to be done. Individual cabins were for sleeping, or whatever else they needed. Ash felt the floor vibrate as the airlock equalized the pressure and unsealed the door on their side. There was another hum and the door slid open.
She stood before them in her intact green gown.
“Greetings again,” she said to Team Omega. “I am grateful for your help. Thank you very much for taking me on board. I would not have wanted to wait until the corporation picked me up. They can be slow when it comes to us.” She flashed her long eyelashes at Ash.
“By ‘us’ you mean you’re an android?” Kris finally asked her.
“Yes,” she told them. “I would have thought that was obvious from the way I floated over without any kind of suit.” She smiled at them all and Ash began to feel nervous.
Her long hair was the color of fire and flowed down her back. The green gown she wore left enough cleavage to let them know she was built to please the eyes. From a glance, the android didn’t appear to be older than twenty-five standard years. She had lips to match the color of her hair. She wasn’t taller than five-five. Her skin was a translucent color of alabaster.
“Can’t you feel cold?” Pete asked her. “I know the air is a little chilly in here. Do you want us to find a pair of shoes for you?”
“I don’t need shoes,” she told him. “Yes I feel the cold, but it doesn’t bother me. Oh, you can call me Barbara Ann. Rather old fashioned I know, though it’s the name I was assigned.”
No one bothered to ask her if she had a last name.
This part of the asteroid belt, where they were located at the present, was not a place one expected to find refined androids, much less ones that emerged from slagged pirate ships and broadcast high level EAC codes. If she could cross the void of space without any suit, it meant Barbara Ann was designed to fill a special role. One this beautiful was meant for the top echelons of the corporation or some government dignitary. So why was she in a part of the solar system frequented by miners and pirates? Did someone blow all their inheritance money on a vision of the “perfect woman”? Hell, even her voice resembled bells on a spring day.
Ash found himself wishing he didn’t have to bring her back, but this one had to be someone’s property. By opening the EAC transmission it would be logged in the master system that they’d make contact. If he were to follow his instincts and shove her out the airlock EAC would know about it, and whomever owned this creature would come looking to him for the cost.
“Do you mind if I take this unoccupied chair?” she asked in her angelic voice while pointing to an empty seat near the door. Barbara Ann held onto the backrest to keep from floating away.
“I don’t see a problem with that,” Ash told her. Barbara Ann pulled herself down into it and strapped herself into the chair.
“Do you need anything?” Theo asked her. Inside, he couldn’t believe she did. After all, she floated across from one space ship to another.
“Not right now,” she told him. “I do need food and water on occasion, but not very often, and really that’s just carbon intake. The transit between the two ships was difficult and I need some time to regenerate.” She closed her eyes and was silent. Ash couldn’t tell if the android even breathed.
“Message on the way from corporate,” Jack announced as he held onto the monitor. “Looks like the big head again. You want me to patch it through on the monitor?” He pointed to the space where the head and diagrams appeared before.
“Send it through,” Ash replied. He pulled himself to the center of the gunship for a better view.
It was the same head as the last time. “Calisto to Thelema,” it said. “Do we have a confirmation on the destruction of the pirate ship? We noted some action in your part of the sector a half hour ago.” Ash floated over to the panel and laid one hand on it.
“Pirate ship destroyed,” he told the head. “We have a proof of destruction fragment in the air lock storage for your insurance adjusters. We’ll bring it back and you can have it for the collection.”
“Very good,” the head told him as it looked over the crew. “I see you have suffered no obvious injuries. Who is your new companion?.” The head floated over to the silent form of Barbara Ann, who did not open her eyes.
“She is a survivor from the pirate ship,” Ash told him as he followed the head over to her part of the ship. “You didn’t tell us there were any prisoners on the pirate ship. I thought the crew of the ore freighter was all dead.” It was hard to tell from the projected image much about the man who furnished it. Expressions were difficult to make out.
“I don’t recall any mention of a woman on the ore freighter,” the head told him. “She may be a captive from another ship. Did you get any identification on her?”
“Yes I did. Your district office sent us something. She checks out.”
“Fine,” the head told him. “You can take her up with the port authorities when you return. Be sure to get your proof of destruction fragment to the claim office when you arrive before it closes. That will be all.” The head began to fade again and was soon gone.
“Why didn’t you tell him she was an android?” Kris asked Ash. She’s fought to keep her mouth shut during the entire exchange.
“I want her to be someone else’s problem as soon as possible, no reason to rock the boat before we even get to port,” Ash responded, “The job is done, let’s shake dust.”
2
Barbara Ann stayed silent with her eyes closed while the crew made ready to leave the vicinity of the ore freighter and return to Calisto. They made no attempt at conversing with her during the preparations. Some of the team had experience dealing with androids, but there was still a strange sense of unease around theses created humans. It was enough to make them avoid the part of the ship where Ash had given her a berth.
Once the “scalp” panel was safely stored away, they really had nothing else to do but return to port and collect their fee. Most of the travel arrangements on the Thelema gunship were already coded into the ship’s cyb
ernetic systems and the crew had little to do with it.
The resident cybernetic assistant, an artificial intelligence named “Char”, came with the ship when Ash bought it two years ago. Char was programmed to sound as if he was a man of advanced years. The builders of the ship felt it was easier for a person to react to a cybernaut so long as it was viewed as an older and respected person. They’d given him a list of several voices the AI could use. Ash chose the one he used when he heard it the first time. He’d grown comfortable with Char over the past two years, as they’d traveled around the planetary orbits hunting for pirates and other miscreants.
“Are you familiar with this type of android, Char?” Ash finally asked him before they were ready to leave the orbit around the big freighter. “Anything we need to worry about.”
“I’m not sure where this one came from,” the CA told him. “I have a list of most of the current series in my data base, but she doesn’t match to anything. Androids that can cross between ships in the void of space are grown for industrial use. It helps to have someone who can walk out to a lunar surface and return without needing a suit. She has to be something special. Someone with a lot of money had her custom fabricated. Her purpose is difficult to ascertain, as she gives the appearance of a pleasure model, though of such a robust fabrication that appearance cannot be the focus. As to your next question, I don’t detect any kind of military hardware in her construction, so you have a high probability of safety with her on board.”
Ash was about to ask Char to give him the exact safety figures when the head reappeared.
This time it forced its way through the communications system, which bothered Jack. If the corporate network could push its way to them so quick, what else could they accomplish?
“Hello, Ash,” the floating head said after it found him. “We have a new job for you. One I’m sure your crew will like.” The head gave him a rehearsed smile.
“What about the money we’ve already earned from the pirate ship?” Ash questioned. “When do we get paid from that job?” He folded his hands across his chest.