Spinward Fringe Broadcast 10.5: Carnie's Tale

by Randolph Lalonde

  I was a good pilot, even then, and followed orders, but I fired my guns at the incoming missiles while I got clear of the Daring Dickenson. My tactical computer reported hits on the lead one, but that didn't stop the largest ship in our little fleet from getting hammered. Nothing we had was really made for that kind of punishment, so our old ship split in a dozen places, blowing gasses and a few bodies into space. The second wave of missiles finished the ship off, I couldn't recognize what was left. “What the hell?” I heard Ussi ask as he rolled his fighter into the path of another rush of missiles. “Why are they killing us?” His gun wells spat fire at the incoming military firepower.

  “Get out of there!” Reggie told him over coms.

  I was frozen, the ships I'd known my entire life scattering away from the twisted corpse of the Daring Dickenson. I could only listen as Ussi replied. “Over my cracked hull, you fuckers!” he said a moment before a missile meant to destroy one of our smaller cargo ships hit him instead. There was a quick flash, and he was gone. I remember thinking how small that flash was, my world was getting ripped to pieces and all Ussi got was a small wink of light before he was gone. I can still remember him chasing me around carnival grounds, that man made it his business to keep us kids laughing while he was babysitting.

  “Incoming interceptors, break and engage!” ordered Reggie.

  The wedge of red blips on my old tactical screen confirmed what he was saying, and I took evasive action. The elongated silver ships passed closer than I expected, and I flipped my ship, came up firing, rounds punching at the shields of the nearest fighter.

  They spin and returned fire at all of us with energy weapons so advanced that it's as if we don't have any shields. My port thruster gets hit and explodes, almost ripping right through my cockpit firewall and sending me spinning towards Iora. My computer goes down next and all I have to fight the spin are the old fashioned connections between my stick and my manoeuvring thrusters. It takes me so long to get control back that I think I sweat half my body weight worried that one of those silver interceptors will take a few seconds to finish me off. I get stable in time to see Reggie's ship get blown in half and a wave of fighters so large that I couldn't count them tear the rest of my family apart. Our ships, our homes were torn wide open, and I didn't even have working scanners so I couldn't tell if there were any survivors.

  Lurk's lizard mouth opens and he croaks; “Warning,” as he disconnects from the computer and climbs into my flight suit, sealing it behind him. I realize I'm about to enter the atmosphere whether I like it or not, so I take control. Tears blur my vision, but I can see my starboard engine is still running, I still have most of my manoeuvring thrusters, but all my electronics are dead. “Here's me praying for clear skies, God. Just let me get on the ground in one piece so I can figure out why I'm still alive.”

  I realize that my energy shields are burned out and begin really praying that my heat shielding is intact. As soon as things start getting hot I realize that prayer has gone unanswered and I start pulling up. Then I realize, the top of my ship didn't take any hits, so I flip over and watch the flames of re-entry try to burn through my cockpit.

  Part Four

  Alice pulled the circular neural device from her forehead and sat up with a jerk. Tears were streaming down her face, she'd fit into his shoes too well. His voice was older than it ought to have been for someone at the age of sixteen, a low rumble in her ears that was both weary and somehow comforting. The person she'd just watched lose everything was still just a boy, even though he flew as though he had many years of experience.

  Alice wiped the tears away, took a deep breath then looked at the time the recording was taken. “God, I'm so stupid,” she said to herself realizing that it was right in the middle of the time period when the Holocaust Virus was spreading across the fringes of the galaxy, sometime before the Eden Fleet disappeared. If she had known in advance, checked to see when Noah Lucas started recording the report, she could have braced herself.

  Would I have connected with him as deeply if I knew ahead of time? She thought to herself. Alice looked at Carnie's file picture. The man looked five years older, not two. There was no boy left in that visage, but she could see a gentle strength and blue eyes that looked back at her from the image. She had to know how the lost boy became that man, no matter how severe his crucible was.

  Alice took a deep breath and started the playback again.

  Fear can bring tears in some people, and scare them away in others. I'm glad I'm in the second group, because when I came through the fire I got my first look at a real air to ground war. The gleaming skyline of New Tokyo was filled with smoke, flames and those oval fighters. They ignored me as I flipped my ship and burned towards the deck. I needed a place to land, somewhere I could get a look at my computer systems, my scanners, maybe my communications array to find out if anyone in our convoy survived. If they were still up there I had to get a rescue together, there was no way of knowing how much time they had left.

  I caught sight of a big planetary defence platform, a wide man-made island with interlocking circular domes topped with planet to space cannons. They're making a go of it, and one of their hangars are open. Two mid-sized ships are already on their way in, and I decided to go for it, swooping down so fast that, for a few seconds my whole cockpit was filled with the sight of blue ocean before I pulled up and caused a wake three storeys high. This wasn’t fancy flying to me, this was how I was going to survive, by flying so crazy that no one would be stupid enough to chase me.

  As I was closing on the hangar one of the ships trying to make the safety of the deck – a big, slow hauler with only one cargo container attached – got blown in half by something firing from above. I had just enough time to avoid the scattering debris as it fell into the ocean and I touched down just slow enough so I didn’t liquefy myself from the G's, but hard enough to black out completely.

  I came to and my cockpit was wide open and I was being dragged out by the first real soldiers I’d ever met. “Welcome to Niler Station, the Commerce Complex,” said one. “We're abandoning this hangar, keep up or we'll let the bots tear you to shreds, kid.”

  I kept up, and as soon as we were through the thick armoured door it closed. All the soldiers were quiet, they looked exhausted, and I found a bench. I don't know how long we stayed there, I just remember tears running down my face and keeping quiet while I shook so hard I thought I was going to die.

  A medic in green and black army gear knelt down in front of me, took a scan and nodded to himself. “Take your helmet off and I'll give you a stabilizer. We don't have time to help you any other way, son.”

  I did as I was told, breathing the air of Iora in for the first time. It smelled like burned fuel. Before I had much of a chance to do or say anything, the medic popped a clear pill into my mouth, it dissolved as soon as it touched my tongue and I stopped shaking. The memories of my home and family getting blasted seemed distant within seconds, and my head was mostly clear. “Where am I? What's going on?” The sounds of distant explosions surrounded us.

  “Follow me,” said another broad shouldered man in infantry armour. He didn't wait to see if I did what I was told, but turned and started leaving the room. I hurried after him, helmet under my arm, my old suit looking more like a yellow and black costume compared to their plated armour. “Listen, Kid, I'd love to get you to a trauma centre, but the 'bots tore those up first. Every hospital we've got is a hot zone, and I need more from you than you need from me right now. What's the situation in orbit? How much did you see?”

  “Silver ships blasted my caravan, I don't know if anyone survived,” I said, some of the sorrow creeping back despite whatever medication I was on.

  “What were your people? Freelance law enforcement? Traders?”

  “Carnival people, Warren's Wonders.”

  That made the Lieutenant stop. He turned to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “I'm sorry, I took my kids to one of your shows, they never forgot it. P
robably before you were born, but I think everyone knows your people.”

  I didn't say anything, just looked at him. He may have been four centimetres taller than me, mostly thanks to his combat boots, but I felt like I was a little kid again, looking way up at the big man who looked like I just punched him in the gut. “We were peaceful people,” I said after a while.

  “I know, the Eden drones probably thought you were reinforcements,” the Lieutenant said. “What else do you remember? Anything helps.”

  “There was nothing fighting the silver ships that got us,” I told him. “Navnet was blinking, like there was the normal display and then there was a red screen that looked like everything was on a collision course.”

  “Armen!” the Lieutenant called out. One of his men moved to his side. “I need you to go download the Navnet logs from this pilot's fighter.”

  “That's going to be hard,” I told him. “My flight computer doesn't have power, I took some damage on the way down.”

  “Think you could get at the memory unit and get it out before that bay is overrun?” asked the Lieutenant.

  “I don't know anything about that fighter model, it's a bit before my time,” replied Armen. “I could try.”

  “You have to pull the dash out to get at the memory,” I told him. “I just installed a Unexa Crystal Drive three weeks ago.”

  “Damn, you won't have time to get at it before that bay is filled with bots,” the Lieutenant said.

  “Wait, what about the other ship that was landing at the same time as I was?” I ask.

  “Bots caught that with a tug line and dragged it into the ocean, they're busy ripping it apart now,” another soldier said, pointing to a window ahead.

  I don't know why, but I didn't walk to the window down the hall, I ran, and in the fading sunlight I watched a tug platform with a broad, flat cargo deck holding the ship I saw trying to land with it out of the water enough for civilian repair drones to land on its hull. They worked to cut through the hull like kids tear through the wrapping on their birthday presents. An airlock opened, and a dock loader turned towards it. Someone with more bravery than sense emerged, firing an old hunting rifle at it, and one of the loading bot's grips caught his head in its grasp. An android that had half its face burned off looked the human over as he struggled, then shook his head.

  “Kid, don't look,” someone said as they caught up to me at the window. No one pulled me away from the transparesteel though, and I wasn't so much as blinking. The loader bot tossed the writhing man onto the deck of the barge behind them, and I could see he could still move after he finished rolling part way across the metal platform. A small crowd of androids stood by, the expensive kind that could fool you into thinking they were human sometimes. They watched as several smaller service bots surrounded the man, who was sitting up, his scraped arms raised.

  One of the blocky service bots burst forward so quickly I almost missed it, and it took me a moment to realize that it didn't retreat without a souvenir. The machine stuffed one of the man's stolen arms into a matter recycler on its chest, and the other bots took turns tearing pieces of the man off as he writhed helplessly. A service bot with long arms arrived at the open airlock and reached inside, pulling a screaming woman out by her waist and flinging her onto the deck of the ship, where her body was broken down into compartment sized pieces before they were converted into energy by the bots there. I'm happy I couldn't hear them screaming, that probably sounds selfish, but I think that would have put me in a corner I wouldn't be able to leave.

  “Why is this happening?” I asked. The meds were working, the moment I looked away from the window the experience of watching the murders seemed to soften, grow distant.

  “We don't know why everything with an artificial intelligence is turning on us,” the Lieutenant said. He continued up the ramped hallway, and I stuck to his side. “But it's across the solar system, we lost contact with all the shipyards, our orbital stations and the moon over the last twenty hours. The Eden bots seem to be happy with isolating the planet, our machines are doing the rest of the damage.”

  A heavy metal door closed behind us, and a group of four soldiers began welding it closed right away. “Hey, I might be able to repair my ship when those ‘bots move on. Is there any other way to the hangar?”

  “No, no other way. We’re bunkering up.”

  “My fighter’s still fixable, it only uses basic parts, and I have to get help for my people.”

  “You’ve seen that fighter for the last time. Sorry, kid.”

  Alice’s command unit sent a basic message through the nerves in her arm, one that gave her the impression that she’d be late. It was new direct interface technology, a type that could send specific sensations and messages that resonated with instinctive memory but couldn’t do harm that was in all the latest officer level command and control units.

  She ended the playback and checked her wrist display. She had nine minutes to report to Hangar Four, where an optional Hand to Hand Combat Class was about to begin, and she wasn’t about to miss it. Most, if not the entire Apex class had signed up, many of them were using it to fill their physical training hours, but Alice enjoyed the practice. Nothing cleared her head like sparring.

  Part Five

  In the corner of the training room there was a new set of Interceptor Armour, something no one was allowed to qualify on yet. She was on the list to be one of the first. It was the first time anyone had seen a suit of it. It stood there across from them with the floor mats providing a broad buffer.

  The Interceptor Armour wasn’t the technical marvel that Alice was expecting. The metal slats were so subtle that they were practically invisible to the eye, and there were two types of propulsion – passive enclosed systems and high efficiency thrusters – but they were clunkier than she expected. Instead of being integrated closely under the skin of the armour, they were in armoured components added to the outside. The same went for the enhanced sensor suite, and high powered emitters. The weapons suite was impressive enough with two arm blasters, a miniature rocket launcher and another piece that they temporarily replaced with a harpoon system for latching onto ships. The rest of the suit included a revised shield system and everything they came to expect in an advanced suit made to replace small fighters and mechanized units up to four times the size.

  It wasn’t unusual for their trainers to use classes most of the Apex members were attending to show them something new, or to address other topics. If there was one word Alice would use to describe the curriculum, it would be ‘dense.’ They crammed as much into every lesson as they could, even the elective ones.

  Their instructor, a tall woman who was so fit that it looked like she spent half her hours in the gym, introduced herself as Rusher. That was her code name, and they would refer to her in no other way. Once they were finished going through all the technical details of the suit, she turned the lights over it off. “You won’t be touching that until we’ve finished testing it. Many of you will never need to put that suit on. Either way, you should know a few things. The new suits include systems that will allow you to survive in thirty one gravity units, and that means that there’s a lot of power in the strength enhancement systems. You could put your comrade through a bulkhead by patting him on the back if you don’t know what you’re doing, or worse if you don’t have the coordination and discipline to handle yourself. They tell me that you have martial arts training, but I want to see it for myself since I’ll be one of the people they look to if you splatter someone by giving them a high-five when the safeties in the suit are off.”

  “Pardon me, Ma’am, er, Rusher,” asked Vannez, a late entrant into the program. “But didn’t you just show us several redundant levels of control that are built into the suit so that can’t happen?”

  “I need you to stand right there,” Rusher said, pointing to the middle of the mats.

  “You did it now,” Yawen muttered quietly.

  “And you, Level Five, get over th
ere,” Rusher said, pointing to Yawen. She had completed five hand to hand qualifier tests, two more than she had to in order to graduate the program.

  Yawen straightened up and made her way through her classmates to the mat, standing across from Vannez.

  “Nafalli! Take ‘em both, don’t worry about breaking them, they’re well trained officers at this point, and their suits will take most of the damage.”

  Iruuk took his place across from the pair with little emotion. Once he was in position, Rusher shouted; “Go for the pin, you two against Iruuk. Begin.”

  Yawen and Vannez circled Iruuk, who kept turning to face them both. He had advantages in speed, strength and reach, only other Nafalli had managed to pin him so far. Even then, he managed to win half of his first engagements with new opponents, and his average got better as he learned their tricks and styles. His father taught him to be a good fighter, and with time Alice knew he’d be great.

  Vannez grabbed at his arm, and Iruuk let her take it. She wrapped her legs around his knee and leaned back, but he positioned himself to maintain his balance then pressed down, holding a hand out to keep Yawen at bay. He nearly pinned Vannez then, but she rolled her shoulders and released her grip on his leg. Before she could get out of his reach, he caught one of her legs and flipped her into Yawen, who was just about to leap at him from behind.

  The women fell in a tangle, and Iruuk separated them like children, held them up for a moment and slammed them down on the mat backs first. “Rematch!” Yawen said as the automated referee counted them out.

  “All right, just you and Iruuk here?” Rusher asked.

  “Just me and fur-face,” Yawen said.

  Iruuk released both his opponents. “I don’t mind,” Iruuk replied with a shrug.

  Vannez retreated from the mats, looking unsurprised by the outcome. “Don’t know what she’ll do against that Nafalli.”