The disruptor kept making its way through compartment after compartment of the ship, still exploding as it went, bursting the eardrums and lungs of Centrocor crew members as it passed them by, flash-frying sensitive electronics as it dug its way ever deeper into the mass of the carrier.
It was over in the space of a few seconds. It left Bullam’s head ringing like a bell and blood dripping from her nose. She grabbed a brocaded handkerchief from a pocket of her suit and pressed it—hard—against her face. “Captain,” she called. “Captain Shulkin!”
Smoke drifted across the bridge. The only light came from a single display that looked like a jigsaw puzzle—some of its emitters must have been smashed. In the fitful light, she saw Shulkin floating in the middle of the bridge, holding on to his chair with the long, skeletal fingers of one hand.
He was smiling.
“Well done,” he said, a throaty whisper.
Then he flipped around to face the navigator. “Take us closer to the cruiser,” he said.
“Captain, sir,” the IO said. Blood slicked the left arm of the man’s suit. “We need to do some damage control, we need to make sure we haven’t lost—”
“The battle,” Shulkin insisted, “isn’t over yet. Move us closer. Tell the Batygin brothers to engage with everything they have.”
Bullam held her neck with one hand—she was relatively sure it wasn’t broken—and tapped anxiously at her wrist minder. It brought up a new display, showing her the city below. Fighters banked and soared over its spires, individual ships now caught up in lethal dogfights. She saw one of the enemy BR.9s break into pieces, debris twisting and streaming away from it even as inertia carried it on a crash course down into the city streets. Debris from collisions and explosions and general destruction was cascading down on the dark stone towers, a dangerous rain of burnt titanium and shredded carbon fiber.
A single BR.9 flashed across her view, momentarily filling the entire display. She backed up frame by frame until she could see the pilot’s face. Sharp features, hair pulled back in a severe bun, prim, pursed lips. Maggs had said this Candless was a teacher. She’d come very close to killing every human being on the carrier.
The damage done. Candless was streaking away, swinging back and forth to avoid Centrocor fire. She was breaking free of the fight, headed back toward the cruiser. Not to defend it, Bullam thought. No.
“They’re retreating,” she said.
“Don’t be a fool,” Shulkin told her. “Where could they go? There’s only one exit from this cavern, and we’re blocking their way.”
Bullam shook her head. “That attack—it wasn’t meant to kill us. Just tie us up with damage control. She was playing for time.”
“Time for what?” Shulkin demanded.
They didn’t have to wait long to get an answer.
Bullam was probably the only one on the bridge who was looking at the city, not at the battle still raging all around them. She was the first to notice when all the searchlights down there began to pivot around, until they were all facing the same direction. A surge of white light poured out of them, beam after beam twisting around toward a common target. Though she couldn’t see what they were pointing at—they seemed to be converging on thin air.
“What are they doing?” she demanded, not really expecting an answer. Nor did she receive one. None of the bridge crew were even paying attention to her. Valk’s drone ships were tearing away at one of the destroyers, targeting its many guns, scoring its hull with burst after burst of concentrated PBW fire. Candless was halfway back to the cruiser already, where Lanoe was still defending his ship against all comers.
“There’s something … happening,” she said. “Damn you, Shulkin! Look at this!”
The glass-eyed captain finally twisted around in his seat to look at her. She held up her wrist minder so he could see the display.
The beams from the city were coalescing into a cloud of radiance, a sort of nebulous, formless glob of light. No, she realized. That wasn’t light—it was plasma, some kind of ionized gas …
“You, there! Traitor!” Shulkin called.
Maggs looked deeply hurt, but he refrained from saying anything in his own defense. The charge was, after all, irrefutable. “How may I assist?”
“You were with Lanoe before we got here. What the devil is he doing? What are those beams? Some kind of weapon?”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t privy to his negotiations with the people of that city,” Maggs said. “I haven’t the faintest. Many apologies.”
Shulkin’s face was fleshless and pale at the best of times. At that moment he looked like nothing more than a skull with lips. “IO! Give me data on that weapon!”
“Sir, it’s … a series of collimated plasma beams, and, well … Yes,” the poor information officer said, “I suppose it could be used as a … as a weapon, but—”
“Stop stammering and tell me what I need to know,” Shulkin said. “Or I will replace you with someone who can.”
The navigator and pilot looked away. They knew perfectly well what Shulkin meant. He’d shot the previous navigator for hesitation following an order. There was no question he would do the same thing again.
“The beams are hot enough to cut through armor plate, yes, sir,” the IO said. “I’m getting some anomalous readings from them, though—the plasma seems to have negative mass.”
“Negative? Negative mass?”
“It’s not as impossible as it sounds, sir. It’s called exotic matter, and hypothetically you could use it to create a—”
On the display, the beams wove together into a ring of coruscating light. It flared bright enough that Bullam started to look away—but then the ring collapsed inward, into itself, and seemed to pop out of existence, as quickly as it had appeared.
“—to create a wormhole throat,” the IO finished, in a near whisper.
Where the ring had been, where the beams had crossed, there was nothing now except a strange spherical distortion in the air. As if a globe of perfect glass hung there.
Every single one of them knew what that meant. A wormhole throat. A passageway through the belly of the universe. It could go anywhere—literally anywhere.
And it was right where the cruiser needed it to be.
“They’re going to escape,” Bullam said, hardly believing it. “They’re going to get away from us—again.”
BR.9s started streaming into the cruiser’s open vehicle bay, one by one. Static guns mounted on the hull of the Hoplite blazed away at those few Sixty-Fours that were still in range, still trying to get close enough to the cruiser to launch disruptors.
“Their engines are warming up,” the IO called out. “They’re going to move.”
“Of course they are,” Shulkin said. He sat down in his chair and pulled a strap across his waist. Then he steepled his fingers together before his face.
“Batygins,” he called.
“A bit busy right now,” one twin said.
“A bit busy right now,” the other replied.
“I don’t care,” Shulkin said, though his voice was oddly soft. “Maneuver on your own time. Right now I need you to pour every ounce of fire you can into that cruiser. I want every missile, every flak gun firing—if this is our only chance, we will kill Aleister Lanoe. Am I understood?”
The brothers didn’t even take the time to respond. Their guns opened fire almost instantly, heavy PBW salvos lancing across the sky, missiles firing in quick succession out of their pods. A few shots even found their target, burning long streaks down the engine modules of the Hoplite. Missiles locked on and flared with light as they accelerated toward the cruiser’s thrusters. Anything in the way of that torrent of destruction would have been vaporized.
But it was too late. Even Bullam—who had no training in space combat—could see that. The cruiser’s nose was already disappearing into the new wormhole throat, even as a final BR.9 raced for safety inside its vehicle bay. Lanoe’s ship vanished into thin air, a little at a
time. On the display it looked like it was moving with glacial slowness, like it had all the time in the world. But it kept disappearing, bit by bit.
“Keep firing!” Shulkin said.
A missile hit home—but only one. It burst against a thick plate of armor on the cruiser’s side, light and debris spreading outward in a deadly cloud. But the Hoplite was half gone now, its coilguns blinking out of existence one by one. The vehicle bay disappeared, and then the thrusters were all that remained, just a dull glow of heat and ionized gas and then—finally—even that was gone.
The missiles lost their lock and could no longer home in on their targets. Rudderless, they twisted off, away from the wormhole throat, losing speed as they twirled pointlessly in the air. A few blasts of heavy PBW fire followed the cruiser through the throat, but it was impossible to see if they hit anything at all.
Eventually the destroyers stopped firing. What was the point?
Shulkin lifted his hands to his face, covering his eyes.
Bullam held her breath. She knew that something was coming. The captain was insane. Neurologically impaired. Back when he’d still been with the Navy, he’d developed a suicidal mania brought on by extreme combat stress. The Navy had fixed him, as best they could, with extensive brain surgery. They’d left him nearly catatonic, unable to do anything but fight.
Cheated of his prey now—how would he react? Would he pull out a pistol and blow his own brains out? Or maybe he would shoot everyone else first.
“Maggs,” Bullam whispered. “Maggs, get ready to run if—”
“Send the recall,” Shulkin said.
“Sir?” the IO asked.
“Send the recall order. I want every fighter back here, in our vehicle bay. I want the destroyers lined up and ready to maneuver. Have all crew aboard this ship report to stations, or to their bunks if they have no immediate duties.”
“Yes, sir,” the IO said.
Then Shulkin started to scrape at his own eye sockets. Digging his nails deep into the skin around his eyelids. Rubbing at his brows with the balls of his thumbs.
“Captain?” Bullam asked. “Are you …?”
“Navigator,” Shulkin said. “Give me a course that takes us through that wormhole as fast as possible.”
“Wait,” Bullam said.
“If the civilian observer wishes to comment on my orders, she can do so in writing at some future time,” Shulkin said. “Navigator?”
“Course entered, sir.”
“Pilot,” Shulkin said. “Take us—”
“No,” Bullam said. “No! That won’t be necessary. Our mission was to find out what Lanoe was up to. To find these allies he was looking for, and, well, here we are.” She opened a display to show the city below them. “We’ve done it, Captain. We’ve reached our objective and we no longer need to capture Lanoe, we can—”
“Ignore her,” Shulkin said. “If anyone on this bridge so much as looks at her, they will be disciplined. This is my ship. Pilot, take us through that wormhole.”
“Sir, I’m sorry to interrupt,” the IO said, “but there’s something you should know. That wormhole isn’t stable.” On his display a schematic of the wormhole appeared. It dwindled even as Bullam watched, the throat tightening down to nothing. “It’s shrinking. If we get caught in there when it collapses, we’ll be annihilated. Every one of us will die. And we, uh … we won’t be able to … kill Lanoe.”
“Noted,” Shulkin said. He scratched along the side of his nose as if he were trying to peel off a mask. “Pilot,” he said, “I believe I gave you an order. If Lanoe thinks he can make it through, so can we. And I will not allow him to get away from me. This battle is not over until I say it is!”
No one on the bridge said a word. None of them moved, except the pilot. And she only stirred far enough to get the ship moving.
Gravity pushed them all down into their seats as the carrier surged forward, toward the wormhole throat.
introducing
If you enjoyed
FORGOTTEN WORLDS,
look out for
ARTEFACT
The Lazarus War: Book 1
by Jamie Sawyer
Mankind has spread to the stars, only to become locked in warfare with an insidious alien race. All that stands against the alien menace are the soldiers of the Simulant Operation Program, an elite military team remotely operating avatars in the most dangerous theaters of war.
Captain Conrad Harris has died hundreds of times—running suicide missions in simulant bodies. Known as Lazarus, he is a man addicted to death. So when a secret research station deep in alien territory suddenly goes dark, there is no other man who could possibly lead a rescue mission.
But Harris hasn’t been trained for what he’s about to find. And this time, he may not be coming back …
Chapter One
NEW HAVEN
Radio chatter filled my ears. Different voices, speaking over one another.
Is this it? I asked myself. Will I find her?
“That’s a confirm on the identification: AFS New Haven. She went dark three years ago.”
“Null-shields are blown. You have a clean approach.”
It was a friendly, at least. Nationality: Arab Freeworlds. But it wasn’t her. A spike of disappointment ran through me. What did I expect? She was gone.
“Arab Freeworlds Starship New Haven, this is Alliance FOB Liberty Point: do you copy? Repeat, this is FOB Liberty Point: do you copy?”
“Bird’s not squawking.”
“That’s a negative on the hail. No response to automated or manual contact.”
I patched into the external cameras to get a better view of the target. She was a big starship, a thousand metres long. NEW HAVEN had been stencilled on the hull, but the white lettering was chipped and worn. Underneath the name was a numerical ID tag and a barcode with a corporate sponsor logo–an advert for some long-forgotten mining corporation. As an afterthought something in Arabic had been scrawled beside the logo.
New Haven was a civilian-class colony vessel; one of the mass-produced models commonly seen throughout the border systems, capable of long-range quantum-space jumps but with precious little defensive capability. Probably older than me, retrofitted by a dozen governments and corporations before she became known by her current name. The ship looked painfully vulnerable, to my military eye: with a huge globe-like bridge and command module at the nose, a slender midsection and an ugly drive propulsion unit at the aft.
She wouldn’t be any good in a fight, that was for sure.
“Reading remote sensors now. I can’t get a clean internal analysis from the bio-scanner.”
On closer inspection, there was evidence to explain the lifeless state of the ship. Puckered rips in the hull-plating suggested that she had been fired upon by a spaceborne weapon. Nothing catastrophic, but enough to disable the main drive: as though whoever, or whatever, had attacked the ship had been toying with her. Like the hunter that only cripples its prey, but chooses not to deliver the killing blow.
“AFS New Haven, this is Liberty Point. You are about to be boarded in accordance with military code alpha-zeroniner. You have trespassed into the Krell Quarantine Zone. Under military law in force in this sector we have authority to board your craft, in order to ensure your safety.”
The ship had probably been drifting aimlessly for months, maybe even years. There was surely nothing alive within that blasted metal shell.
“That’s a continued no response to the hail. Authorising weapons-free for away team. Proceed with mission as briefed.”
“This is Captain Harris,” I said. “Reading you loud and clear. That’s an affirmative on approach.”
“Copy that. Mission is good to go, good to go. Over to you, Captain. Wireless silence from here on in.”
Then the communication-link was severed and there was a moment of silence. Liberty Point, and all of the protections that the station brought with it, suddenly felt a very long way away.
Our Wildc
at armoured personnel shuttle rapidly advanced on the New Haven. The APS was an ugly, functional vessel–made to ferry us from the base of operations to the insertion point, and nothing more. It was heavily armoured but completely unarmed; the hope was that, under enemy fire, the triple-reinforced armour would prevent a hull breach before we reached the objective. Compared to the goliath civilian vessel, it was an insignificant dot.
I sat upright in the troop compartment, strapped into a safety harness. On the approach to the target, the Wildcat APS gravity drive cancelled completely: everything not strapped down drifted in free fall. There were no windows or view-screens, and so I relied on the external camera-feeds to track our progress. This was proper cattle-class, even in deep-space.
I wore a tactical combat helmet, for more than just protection. Various technical data was being relayed to the heads-up display–projected directly onto the interior of the face-plate. Swarms of glowing icons, warnings and data-reads scrolled overhead. For a rookie, the flow of information would’ve been overwhelming but to me this was second nature. Jacked directly into my combat-armour, with a thought I cancelled some data-streams, examined others.
Satisfied with what I saw, I yelled into the communicator: “Squad, sound off.”
Five members of the unit called out in turn, their respective life-signs appearing on my HUD.
“Jenkins.” The only woman on the team; small, fast and sparky. Jenkins was a gun nut, and when it came to military operations obsessive-compulsive was an understatement. She served as the corporal of the squad and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
“Blake.” Youngest member of the team, barely out of basic training when he was inducted. Fresh-faced and always eager. His defining characteristics were extraordinary skill with a sniper rifle, and an incredible talent with the opposite sex.
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