by Shane Black
“He doesn’t look too good, ma’am,” Amy said.
“In about fifteen minutes, he’s going to look a lot worse. Get us back on the air, Lieutenant.” Jayce slapped the woman’s good shoulder to encourage her.
“Aye.”
Hunter moved quickly across the lab and retrieved the TK40 rifle from the unconscious corporal she had threatened earlier. She put her hand to his forehead. Up to now she hadn’t been aware of just how young he was. She paused for a moment to think a good thought and then she performed a quick field evaluation of his weapon. It was in perfect working order with a full charge.
Now we can hit back she thought. She joined her XO at the door. “What’s the situation out there?”
“They’ve got heavy rifles and they’re moving up along the reinforced corridor to the right and further down.”
Jayce pulled the mechanical power lock on her weapon and let the connectors snap into place with a satisfying metallic thud. “Range?”
“Ten meters, maybe less.”
“Perfect. Let’s blow them a kiss.”
Jayce Hunter suddenly appeared in the center of the besieged corridor and leveled the relatively large rifle at her hip. A flash of stark light reflected from the drifting smoke, launching a fast moving bolt of energy down the corridor. A half-second later, Hunter detonated it with another shot, and a savage explosion twisted and battered the bulkheads up and down the passageway.
Two shadowy forms slipped across the passage, drawing a barrage of rifle fire from Hunter. At least one of the attackers fired back, but the shots were wide and impacted against the ceiling. Jayce pumped lance after blinding lance of white-hot energy into the floor and walls, causing debris to eject, splinter and scatter all over the corridor.
Another figure appeared and hesitated in the open. In a split-second, Hunter realized the attacker was readying another grenade. She fired another bolt down the hall just as a second attacker broke from cover. The detonation filled the hallway with fire.
There was a scream, followed by a burst of weapons energy. A deafening vicious second explosion from the dropped grenade ripped a hole in the station’s internal atmosphere. One of the attackers ran headlong from the conflagration, his entire body in flames. Jayce ducked to one side as more weapons fire followed shouts and the sound of falling machinery.
In the ensuing confusion, Hunter managed to hit two more of the attackers with bursts of lethal plasma energy. The safety systems had long since been out of commission, so every shot that missed blew another cloud of hot, razor sharp debris off the walls and ceilings. Hunter fired another extended burst, causing several more violent explosions, and then ducked back into the records lab.
“Having fun?” Huggins asked.
“Always preferred a stand up fight,” Hunter exhaled, holding the rifle muzzle straight up as regulations required. “Sutherland! Tell me a happy story!”
“We’re being jammed! We don’t have the power to punch through the local distortion field with this equipment!”
“Fine,” Hunter sighed. She pulled a second handheld comm unit out and tapped configuration codes into it. “Let’s see them jam this.”
“What is that for? You’ve got two of those things!?”
“Yep. This one is a VLF ultrawideband transmitter. Takes several seconds to send a data packet, but unless you’ve got a matter/anti-matter reactor powering your jamming equipment, you’ve got no chance of modulating the signal.”
“Who are you calling?”
“The world’s smallest invasion force.”
Not far away, Commander Hunter’s mini-bots were still in formation, headed up a well-lit but empty corridor towards the research side of the station.
An little red heart-shaped indicator light on Echo’s forward-facing chassis snapped on. “It’s Acey! It’s Acey!” she shouted. “She says she’s in trouble and she needs help!”
“Let me at ‘em” Rebel growled. He revved his drive train, but only managed to spin his tracks.
“You have to wait until you’re on the ground, Rebel” Butterfly said in a “bigger kid reminding little kid” tone of voice. She carefully maneuvered along her flight path.
“Brothers and sisters,” Wave began. “As we prepare to take the field of battle, let us all remember though we be awesome individuals, we are also one, and as one we will prevail.”
“You know it,” Lunar added.
“Don’t be scared, Butterfly! I’ll protect you!” Echo shouted.
“I’ll be okay!” Butterfly was picking up residual weapons fire readings.
“Acey sent me a battle plan! I’ll share it with everybody!” Echo said excitedly.
“That’s the corridor!” Wave said. “Shaka, dudes and dudettes. Let’s carve the chop!”
To a spectator, what happened next would have looked for all the world like a 1950s monster film with little model trucks and tanks attacking a guy in a hairy rubber suit. Butterfly performed a textbook assault airlift maneuver, descending at maximum safe speed and placing Rebel in the center of the corridor. She detached and reeled in her magnetic harness as she pitched forward, using her main rotors to accelerate up the battlefield. Rebel’s powerful quad-drives kicked in and the chunky little tank rolled towards the action, climbing over small pieces of debris effortlessly.
Wave pulled up along Rebel’s right flank and collapsed his bay ramp. Echo’s lightbars began rotating red emergency lights as she backed down the ramp to the corridor floor. As soon as all four of her wheels were on the ground, she swerved to one side with a chirp of her tires and accelerated, following Butterfly’s lead.
Lunar banked into a position about six feet above Rebel and Wave. “I’ve got targets! Establishing telemetry and battlespace datalink! Acknowledge!”
“Rebel acknowledges!”
“Wave acknowledges!”
“Echo here! I read you Lunar!”
“I see it, Lunar!” Butterfly said.
One of the intruders had fallen back to swap energy packs in his rifle. He saw the little vehicles first. As usual, there was a moment of hesitation and amusement as he saw a tank in the distance roughly the size of a thick encyclopedia climbing slowly over a pile of broken conduits and rolling ponderously down the other side. That hesitation was what the mini-bots always counted on, as it gave them time to close range.
Before he knew what was going on, a tiny helicopter burst from the drifting smoke and accelerated up the corridor right at his head. The shadowy intruder stumbled back as Butterfly whizzed past. By the time he had regained his feet, the sound of buzzing emergency horns, chattery sirens and chirping alert signals filled the corridor. He looked down to find a lights-rotating ambulance bumping into his ankles.
“Emergency! Emergency! Clear the road! Clear the road!”
Finally a 110-decibel compressor-charged banger siren sounded, which was enough to drive the intruder back several yards. Echo accelerated down the hall, swerving around the wreckage of the battle, lights spinning. He turned and Lunar was hovering six inches from his nose. A targeting laser appeared right between the intruder’s eyebrows.
“My name is Lunar, and you are my prisoner.”
Thirty-Three
“You can tell me now, or we’ll just pull the plans from the Dunkerque’s memory banks. It’s only a matter of time, colonel. Give it up and tell me what’s going on between you and Hughes.”
Atwell continued to stare at the ceiling. The only evidence the man was even alive was his open eyes. The brig cell’s invisible forcefield hummed.
“What are you protecting at Raleo?”
That got the reaction Hunter presumed it might. Atwell turned his head and harumphed. “You’re so far behind at this point, Captain, your only hope is to run for home and kiss your loved ones goodbye.”
“Big words from a man in a cell, colonel.”
“What we discovered out there will change the very nature of reality itself. Your meaningless attempts to understand what is happ
ening here do not concern us in the slightest.”
“And who is ‘us,' colonel? I see a lot of Skywatch ships. I see an interdiction formation and I see a big gun with no power system hooked up yet. If I didn’t know better, I’d start wondering if this isn’t all an elaborate bluff just like your little toy.”
Atwell got to his feet silently and walked right up to the forcefield to stare Hunter down.
“You were warned. You were warned again. You chose to come here knowing full well things were not as they appeared. I tried to save you. The admiral ordered me to save you. But you didn’t listen. And now you and your crew are going to die. You speak of time, Captain. You have no idea how little of it you have left.”
“If you’re so certain of yourself, colonel, then why the constant stream of riddles? Speak plainly for a change. What is going on at Raleo?”
Atwell hesitated, apparently believing he was going to be able to get Hunter to blink. Finally he turned and went back to his mattress-less bunk and sat down. The man looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept in days. Perhaps he hadn’t, but Hunter had to have answers.
“The Dunkerque detected a structure on the surface of Raleo Two–”
“That planet is a ball of lava and thousand-degree rocks, colonel. Any ‘structure’ down there would melt into ashes in a matter of minutes no matter what it was made out of.”
“The structure we found is sixty million years old.”
Hunter didn’t answer right away.
“Then how–”
“How, indeed, Captain. When the obelisk was built, the Raleo system didn’t exist. Are you getting the picture now? Are you willing to put aside your cowboy hat and six shooter and allow your tiny mind to glimpse the true destiny of humanity?”
“Let’s say you’re right and the structure you found doesn’t make any logical sense. What does that have to do with Admiral Hughes and the crew of the Dunkerque?”
“Our first readings didn’t make any sense. They weren’t scientifically meaningful. They couldn’t be explained by anyone aboard, even our archaeological team. But that was just our first attempt. After a series of experiments, we determined the laws of physics were breaking down the closer our instruments got to the obelisk. Finally, we managed to complete a molecular analysis of the planet’s surface around the object and discovered five completely new elements, but that’s not what made us take the next step.”
“You sent people down there?”
“Our scientists had to know. Even our non-technical command staff knew something huge was right under our feet. So we concocted a likely story and came back out here with our cargo bays filled with specialized equipment. We have observed the impossible, Captain. What happened next cannot be explained by any science known to man.”
“What are we talking about here, colonel? You found El Dorado? Another dimension? Gateways? What?”
“Our astrophysicist calls it ‘quantum reflection.’ It’s as good a term as any, because our best efforts to catalog and replicate our experiments have all failed. Every time we test the zone around the obelisk, we get another set of readings that have nothing to do with the previous set. None of it makes any sense!”
“And all this data is on the Dunkerque?”
Atwell nodded wearily. “One thing we did find is that isotopes don’t decay here. They strengthen. So instead of going from unstable to stable in one direction, they go from unstable to more unstable in the other. Our theory is there is something affecting matter and energy that causes quantum effects to form feedback loops that build up unstable energy. The only thing keeping it from ripping the planet to pieces is the effects lose energy the further they get from the obelisk, but that’s not going to last.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the nature of these effects mean they build on each other, Captain. The longer that object stays in our space, the more powerful it gets. Eventually it will start to affect Raleo Two itself, and then it will start affecting the Raleo primary. If it gets a hold of that star’s energy, we theorize it will go hypercritical in a matter of hours. We have no idea what will happen next.”
“Then why don’t we just destroy it?”
“Still thinking with your guns, eh, Captain? This is why we don’t share important discoveries with average people!”
“I took an oath, colonel! And so did you! If that thing is a threat to human populations, I’m going to fly out there and punch its ticket! That’s my duty as a Skywatch Captain!”
“You can’t destroy it any more than we could. That thing would eat your weapons like candy and spit them right back at you. That’s assuming whatever is on the other side of that obelisk doesn’t simply kill you first!”
“What do you mean, other side?”
“We got a voice transmission before we called in reinforcements. The commanders of those ships have all been apprised of the possible dangers. We still haven’t been able to translate it. The only thing our linguistics banks came up with was there are apparently over a thousand voices in the message, all overlapping in the same data stream.”
“There’s an intelligence involved here?”
“Far beyond our own, Captain. We could be facing an invasion, or any of a hundred other larger threats!”
“Well, there’s one certainty in all this, colonel. The answers are aboard your ship, and one way or another, I’m going to get at them.” Hunter started for the exit.
“Watch yourself, hot shot.” Hunter paused at the exit as Atwell raised his voice. “The Dunkerque was parked in orbit over that obelisk for days before we were able to evacuate the crew!”
Hunter left the brig and hurried for the Flight Deck.
“We have no idea what’s left aboard!” Atwell’s voice echoed throughout the detention section as Hunter climbed into the magneto-lift.
Thirty-Four
“New contact bearing zero mark zero! Collision alarm!”
The sudden shouts from the Fury’s tactical officer startled everyone on the bridge. One moment everything was functioning smoothly and the next, they were surrounded by screaming nightmares.
Senior Lieutenant Sabrina Mallory swiveled in the bridge command chair. “Reflex batteries forward! Fire! Point blank!”
A frigate-class vessel hurtled at full power towards the Fury’s bridge, its engines glowing red-hot through their cowlings and hull plating. A moment later, the enormous strike cruiser’s forward point defense weapons exploded to life, filling space with a terrifying yellow-white fusillade. Sixty shots per second poured from each battery. The overloaded plasma energy produced a huge cloud of residual particles in the cubic mile of space forward of the Perseus flagship.
Dozens of bolts ripped into the ablative nose armor of the smaller ship, tearing huge spinning chunks off and throwing them into space in its wake. Dust and electrical arcs formed an enormous static shockwave forward of the vessel as its atmosphere ignited against the suddenly intense surface heat of the rapidly disintegrating hull structure. A secondary explosion shook the ship’s inner decks, but still it came, streaming atmosphere and burning debris.
The boot of the gods impacted Fury’s port armor and the bridge crew fought to retain consciousness as the entire vessel pitched a good 35 degrees to starboard. The auto-alert systems activated and decompression alarms began to sound.
“What the hell was that!?” Mallory barked.
“Weapons fire port!” someone shouted in response.
“Veer us off, pilot! All engines back full. Give me a port reversing turn! All battle screens to maximum power!”
“Too late!”
For only a moment, the fireball-trailing frigate filled the screen and then another incredible blast plunged the Fury bridge into complete darkness.
“Auto alarm! Fury’s been hit!” shouted the weapons officer on the bridge of DSS Spruance. “I have weapons fire bearing one zero five!”
The mighty cruiser’s captain calmly shifted into action. “Sound fleet-wide general
quarters, Ensign. Helm, bring us about, course seven seven mark one five! All ahead one half power! Comms, bring us up on the J-A. Patch us in as Zero Juliet Four. Signal all ships. Task Force Perseus. Code Zero Zero Black. I say again Code Zero Zero Black. Engage battle conference on this channel and stand by for strike operations.”
The communications officer responded with precision efficiency as he performed five tasks at once. “Affirmative, Captain. Coding your message.”
Encrypted LOS channels opened across space in all directions. The jangling clear channel alert tone sounded.
“All stations, this is Spruance Force Command on emergency channel. Acknowledge Code Zero Zero Black and report alert status to Signal Station Zero Juliet Four. Standing by.”
“Affirmative, Spruance, this is Revenge, acknowledging strike alert at time out three zero mark. Vessel at your command.”
“Constellation acknowledges.”
“Minstrel is at point five. Station Eight Juliet Four. Standing by.”
“DSS Jefferson acknowledging. Battle alert engaged!”
“Rhode Island at your command, sir.”
“Exeter acknowledges.”
“DSS Ajax has the point, Spruance. Acknowledge battle stations code Zero Zero Black. Standing by.”
“Comms, raise the Fury as soon as you are able. Tactical, report all contacts.”
A chorus of “ayes” responded, one for each of the Spruance Skipper’s commands. Lieutenant Commander Francis Teller swiveled back to examine the main viewscreen. An atmosphere-fueled fire was burning on Fury’s dorsal section just aft of the bridge. Teller’s jaw tightened. He knew what that damage meant.
“CIC, I want an origin point and a firing solution for that weapon in ten seconds.”
The Perseus Task Force went from station keeping to a perfectly choreographed swirl of motion all at once. Three destroyers and three frigates moved to screen their flagship from further weapons fire while the two heavier cruisers pounded away with their active scanners, combing nearby space for the source of the weapons fire.