One Dark Future

by Michael Anderle

  “Only Captain Osei and Lieutenant Zhang remain alive,” Emma offered dispassionately. “Shall I seal the Argo?”

  “Not yet,” Erik replied, his hands curling into fists. “We need to give him a chance to escape.”

  “Unless you altered things when I lost contact, I estimate you have about four minutes left before the explosives go off,” Emma replied. “It’s highly unlikely he can move through the tunnel and the other ship and arr—”

  “You seal at one minute,” Erik interrupted. “Not a damned second sooner. Understood?”

  “That might be insufficient time to avoid damage, depending on the size of secondary explosions. I would recomm—”

  “One minute,” Erik shouted.

  “Understood,” Emma replied timidly.

  Jia’s hands flew over controls. She didn’t want to leave the escape to Emma. She owed it to the men who had died, and the men they might have to leave behind to be personally involved.

  The enormity of the situation weighed on her.

  This wasn’t some skirmish over political control on the frontier, or even good men taking on ideologically misguided terrorists.

  A horrible enemy had been sleeping in the Solar System for thousands of years, and now soldiers were giving their lives to protect their species from something powerful enough to prey on the Navigators.

  “Is everyone secured?” she asked.

  “All survivors are secured,” Emma replied. “Erik, I’ve lost my feeds to the alien ship. My remaining drones were destroyed, but before I lost my feed, Lieutenant Zhang was dead, and Captain Osei had suffered grievous wounds and extensive damage to his pressure suit. The enemy is now in the boarding tube.”

  Erik gritted his teeth. “Seal the ship.”

  “Making all due preparations,” Emma offered apologetically. “And I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  Jia stared at a data window, waiting for full retraction and sealing before pulsing the side thrusters and spinning the Argo around. “Initiating hard burn!”

  Even the Argo’s superior grav compensators couldn’t block the push against her seat as the engines screamed to life and pushed it away from the other ships. She stared at the sensor display as the marker indicating the comet grew distant and the symbol depicting the jumpship grew closer.

  “One minute until estimated explosion,” Emma reported.

  “Do you think it’ll be enough?” Jia asked. “We didn’t cover the entire ship.”

  Erik shook his head. “We wouldn’t need that much on a human ship. I just wanted to be sure. We placed enough L-48 to do a decent number on a tower. For all their weird-ass biological shit, their monsters died when we started using heavy guns. I’m sure there will be pieces left over, but that’s where we can clean up with the jumpship.”

  Jia took slow, careful breaths, keeping up the thrust.

  “Thirty seconds,” Emma offered. “Twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”

  It was absurd. Her overzealous sense of justice had set her on a path that led to a new, hostile alien race. If men hadn’t just died, she would have laughed at the ridiculousness of it all.

  Now, she just couldn’t.

  “Ten, nine, eight…”

  “When we get a chance to catch our breaths,” Jia murmured, “we need to talk about something.”

  “Seven, six, five…”

  “Fuck that,” Erik replied. “I already know what you want to say. I love you.”

  “Five, four, three…” Emma counted.

  “I love you, too,” Jia murmured and brought up the rear feed.

  “Two, one…”

  It was time to see if it was all worth it.

  Chapter Fifty

  The explosion rippled out from the side connected to the boarding tube, blasting ice and rock in every direction and consuming the conspiracy ship.

  It was eerily beautiful—the beginning of its death at the hands of both ancient ice and modern fire.

  Jia was impressed. When Captain Osei and Erik had discussed the L-48, she’d anticipated it damaging the Hunter ship but not being visible from outside.

  A secondary explosion burst from the conspiracy ship. The force of the blast launched a huge chunk of the comet away, revealing the dark body of the disk-like ship. The flying debris obscured the direct view, but it didn’t hide the gaping hole in the Hunter ship. It was as if the comet was an outer body, and the ship the heart.

  The humans’ effort had torn out the dark heart of the vengeful waking god.

  It was insane. Erik and Jia had been outgunned many times in their short career together, but taking on the Hunters went beyond that. The two of them had been stone-age warriors with spears trying to charge a machine-gun nest.

  Jia shook her head. She couldn’t think that way.

  They’d just blown a hole in the Hunter ship using a combination of human explosives and sacrificing a human ship. As impressive as the Hunter biotechnology was, the team had won fights against their monstrous creations.

  The Hunters were more advanced, yes, but humans did win. A god who could bleed was a god who could die, let alone a half-forgotten remnant, long-buried and comfortable with death if not for the arrogance of the conspiracy.

  “Was it enough?” Jia asked, gaze shifting between the obscured camera feed and the sensors. “And did you know the chain explosion would work like that?”

  “We got lucky,” Erik admitted. “They must have had a lot of ordnance on board their ship. L-48 is nice. A ship full of torpedoes is better.”

  Jia allowed hope to well up inside her until she reviewed the sensors once more.

  Rapidly building emission readings across the spectra didn’t bode well for a total defeat of the enemy. Other than the impressive explosion of the conspiracy ship, there’d be no subsequent explosions, no evidence the Hunters had a room filled with missiles or torpedoes waiting to explode.

  It was time to go. Jia spun the Argo around, fired the thrusters to line them up with the Bifröst, and prepared for whatever insanity came next. The fight wasn’t over.

  “What are you seeing, Cutter?” Erik asked, sensing Jia’s focus on piloting.

  “I don’t think we killed it. It’s a lot more active than before.” Cutter groaned. “I think we pissed them off. I don’t know about the wisdom of spitting in the eye of an ancient, powerful…” he waved his hands around, “race thing.”

  Erik let out a mocking laugh. “We’re long past that decision. I think we were the second we stepped aboard that ship, but certainly after we started shooting things and tossing grenades.”

  Jia frowned as her eyes narrowed. Something was happening in the feed, but she couldn’t make it out. With a quick flick of her fingers, she magnified the image. She didn’t know enough about the enemy to interpret what they might be doing from sensor readings alone.

  Grievous wounds in a vessel would normally doom it, but the ship began to seal itself like it had a gigantic version of the spray the boarding party had used. That in and of itself wasn’t shocking, given that the Argo’s hull and armor possessed similar properties, but the darkened, irregular outer hull wasn’t the only new structure emerging. Rounded organic columns, similar to what they’d seen inside along with bulbous fleshy stalks, emerged from the hull.

  That wasn’t unsettling; it was the speed of the growth that managed to send Jia’s already pounding heart into overdrive. She didn’t know a ship in the galaxy that could regenerate that fast. Even advanced Orlox biological technology couldn’t shrug off such a massive amount of damage with such quick repair.

  The bleeding god didn’t care because the wound was not a threat.

  “I’m detecting a massive energy surge,” Emma reported. “It might be best to dock the Argo so I can establish reliable, direct control of the other ship and prepare for our departure.”

  “Not yet,” Erik ordered. “And we’re not leaving before we finish off the Hunter ship. Redirect the grav shields to our exposed side and po
wer all weapons. Minimize power to non-essential systems. Lanara, make sure we don’t blow ourselves up during all this. If we’re going to die, I want to make the enemy work for it.”

  “If we do blow up, it’ll be your fault, Blackwell,” the engineer responded. She sounded out of breath. “And I’ll find some way—preferably horrible—to haunt you.”

  “I’ll be dead, too.”

  “That’ll make it twice as annoying.”

  A bright flash filled the feed, along with a notable spike in x- and gamma-ray emissions. The entire outer shell of the comet shattered as if struck by an invisible giant swinging a hammer of the gods.

  Jia didn’t want to gasp, but her desire didn’t stop it from coming out. She’d never seen anything like this technology outside of bad science fiction movies.

  The excitement continued.

  Seconds later, the shell blasted away in all directions to free the ship from its long imprisonment. Somehow, despite being smaller than the cometary shell that had imprisoned it, seeing the circular mass hanging in space made it loom larger.

  “Well, that’s…something,” Erik muttered.

  “So much for L-48,” Jia grumbled.

  Clusters of glowing red dots spread over the surface of the ship. If they looked like dots at this distance, they must have been huge up close. Jia didn’t have time to think too deeply about them since they spread everywhere until a diffuse energy field clung to the vessel’s hull, if that was the appropriate word.

  Could a ship have skin or an exoskeleton? Jia’s vocabulary failed her. She would hate to be taken out by what vaguely resembled a gigantic space microbe.

  “We should light them up,” Erik suggested.

  “If we try to waste them now, what’s left of the comet is going to take the hit,” Cutter complained. “We’ll be spending more time melting ice than hurting them. I think it’s time to show it our ass and live to fight another day. We might as well take advantage of the comet.”

  “Didn’t you hear me earlier?” Erik growled. “We’re not leaving. If the L-48 didn’t do the job, we’re going to do it. The guns on our ships aren’t for show, Cutter.”

  “Let’s plow the snow,” Jia suggested with a nod at Erik.

  Running wasn’t their style. It was time to teach the Hunters that quintessential human emotion: fear.

  The surviving remnants of the comet hurtled through space, including toward the two ships. Jia marveled at what was effectively a large scatter-missile. Any concern about being pelted disappeared as the point-defense laser turrets on the Argo and Bifröst came alive.

  They blasted the fast-moving chunks into smaller pieces manageable by the grav shields, responsible for nothing more than minor tremors through the ship as they bounced off.

  “Come on,” Jia whispered.

  The turrets continued to annihilate the comet chunks, but the Hunter ship didn’t move.

  “We’ve yet to receive any significant damage,” Emma reported. “Grav emitters and hull are holding.”

  “We might not have finished the ship off,” Jia began, “but that doesn’t mean we didn’t wound it.”

  “Yeah. I’ll take it, especially since I think we busted up their most important system.” Erik brought up the manual controls for the rest of the Argo’s weapons.

  “What’s that?” Jia asked.

  “Their weapons,” Erik replied. “They’re not taking a shot, which means we still have a chance. It looks like all their fancy ancient repair gear didn’t bring back anything they could use to defend themselves. Fixing a single hole, even a big one, isn’t the same as dealing with a massive, constant barrage of attacks.”

  “Most of the debris field coming our way has passed,” Jia replied, calm returning to her voice.

  “Cutter, get ready to fire,” Erik ordered. “In thirty seconds, we’ll both shower death on that bastard until he’s in as many pieces as the comet. Then we’ll blast those pieces into dust.”

  Cutter whistled, the sound extra-annoying over the comm. “Damn. You do understand what we’re about to try?”

  “Stop a dangerous alien ship from escaping into the Solar System?” Jia asked. “After fighting our way off it through dangerous alien creatures and parasitized beings, including some who might have been Navigators?”

  The Argo shook. The small surviving chunks of the debris field bounced off the grav shield, leaving a diffused cloud hanging in space near the ship. Jia angled the ship for maximum coverage from the turrets.

  “No!” Cutter yelled. “This is the real deal: a battle between humanity and an alien race. I’ve done a lot of crazy runs for Alina over the years, but I never thought I’d end up in this situation.”

  “Humanity’s had skirmishes with aliens before.” Erik let out a bitter chuckle. “I would have preferred to fight the damned lizards. The L-48 would have finished them.”

  “We can do this,” Cutter replied. “And we’ll be awesome. These guys are a lot tougher than the Zitarks. Once we beat these guys, all the government needs to do is tell everyone about it, and none of the other races will ever screw with humans. Go, Humanity!”

  Jia shook her head, surprised Cutter could be so cavalier and excited about facing off against a gargantuan living ship from a race that might have destroyed the Navigators. She’d thought he was more interested in running, but she’d witnessed that before.

  The man didn’t want to fight but could find strange reserves of bravery when his back was otherwise against a wall.

  Her heart continued its insane gallop. She admired his courage, but if he’d seen what they had inside, he might be more concerned, even sitting behind the controls of a ship brimming with weapons.

  “We’re mostly clear of the debris,” Emma reported. “No significant damage was sustained.”

  “Huh.” Erik chuckled. “Still no guns from our Hunter ship. Too bad for them. They shouldn’t have brought giant starfishes to a space battle. Time to send those bastards back into history.”

  Jia held her breath. Cutter was right; what they were about to do was historic. Her distant descendants might read about it, or they might be annihilated, and no one would ever know the truth.

  That would neatly solve the issue of worrying about her descendants and whether she might make a good mother.

  The Argo fired first. Erik rapid-fired the torpedo launchers, quickly emptying the stores before unleashing the anti-ship laser turrets and Lanara’s newly installed plasma turret. She noticed he looked sterner than normal.

  This wasn’t a battle they could assume they would win.

  The Bifröst’s turrets joined the fray. Her laser and plasma cannons fired next, but the longer recharge cycle kept them from being near-continuous like the turrets. Torpedoes and missiles spat from the larger ship, forming a swarm heading toward the Hunter ship.

  Jia held her breath as the camera and sensor displays lit up with dozens of small contacts, each representing the culmination of humanity’s thousands of years of weapons development. They were massive explosives that could easily destroy a lesser ship, but no human vessel had fought such a large ship.

  Bright plasma discharges joined the invisible laser beams to strike first while the missiles and torpedoes continued their flight. Jia let out the breath she’d held, waiting for some indication of damage and seeing none.

  The next phase would be critical. The enemy ship was far too large to hope to dodge the angry swarm of explosives, but it was hard to believe they didn’t possess or have an equivalent to point-defense lasers. The function of the stalks, columns, and bumps on the surface remained unclear.

  Nothing fired. If they possessed the relevant defenses, thousands of years of stasis or the L-48 had knocked them off-line.

  She could hope.

  While the human ships continued streaming energy weapons to little visible effect, the missiles and torpedoes continued their inexorable approach with enough death inside to level a mountain.

  The projectiles delivered by the
Argo were all high-powered single warheads, but many from their jumpship contained scatter warheads and split apart at the last moment. What had already been an overwhelming swarm became an all-encompassing field of obliteration difficult to distinguish on the sensors.

  “Survive this, you monsters,” Jia muttered as they finished their trip.

  The explosions overlapped, joining one another to form an expansive red-orange cloud of doom. It grew large enough to obscure the mammoth alien vessel. If the Hunter ship had done anything to stop the missiles and torpedoes, they might have had a chance.

  Jia smiled triumphantly. The barrage they had laid down would have shredded an entire fleet of human ships.

  Erik didn’t stop his attack. He had emptied their torpedo launchers, but he continued firing the laser and plasma turrets into the explosion.

  That made sense to Jia. The armor or shields protecting the Hunter ship might have absorbed the earlier attacks, but the explosions had to have stripped away those defenses and exposed the weaker inside.

  “Cut off the plasma turrets, Blackwell,” Lanara shouted. “We’re risking blowing our power conduits at this rate.”

  “It’s okay,” Erik replied, ceasing fire with the plasma turrets but maintaining his laser fire. “The missiles and torpedoes all hit the bastard anyway.”

  Jia was entranced by the bright blast now covering the ship. All technology had its limits. The Hunters might be more advanced than humans, but they weren’t gods. Plenty of human civilizations had found that technologically inferior societies could put up a good fight.

  Humans were good at many things, including killing. The Hunters should have known better than to pick a fight with a race who had gone from swords and spears to rockets in spacecraft in short centuries.

  The explosion began to dim.

  Jia’s smile collapsed as the explosion ebbed. “No! It’s impossible. It can’t be.”

  The Hunter ship floated untouched in space, the red energy field the same intensity. Jia couldn’t accept it. The combined barrage delivered by the human ships would have destroyed significant chunks of Neo SoCal, but they might as well have been throwing stone-tipped spears at a six-foot metal wall for all the good their attack had done.