by Andrew Beery
Crews rotated between the four stations in an attempt to relieve boredom but it was an impossible task. Over the many decades that the stations had been in place everything that could be done to relieve the boredom had been done countless times. It would be different if the station personnel had the opportunity for shore leave but the Hupenstanii home world was strictly off limits to all but a small team of biohazard experts dressed in Mark-10 hazmat suits. Even that team, the BioOps, was isolated permanently from the rest of the station personnel.
He was just turning the last page of the third chapter of an antique paper novel, a science fiction by a long-dead author name Heinlein, called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress when the alert klaxon began to blare. It had been so long since he had heard it that it took him a moment to react.
He dropped the book and cringed as the old and yellowed pages bent and threatened to rip. His hand reached across his desk and toggled the intercom.
“Report!” He barked.
“Commander, this is Lieutenant Colden. We have an unregistered NEO that’s just been detected. The object will pass within two hundred clicks of our position in about twenty minutes.”
A NEO or Near Earth Object was essentially a rock in space that traveled in an orbit that brought it in proximity to an inhabited world. It was almost unheard of to encounter an unregistered NEO in this day and age.
“How big is it and how the hell did we miss spotting it until it was twenty minutes away?”
“Sir, we actually haven’t spotted it yet. A physics geek on DE3 was studying solar coronal mass ejections when he spotted a massive asteroid emerging from the sun. It must have been pulled in by the sun’s gravity but its orbit and velocity was such that it skipped off the sun’s upper atmosphere before it could burn up completely. Its approach vector puts it between us and the smaller of the moons.”
“OK,” JD said. “I understand why we can’t see it but how is it we are only getting 20 minutes warning? NEOs don’t travel at near relativistic speeds.”
“The geek in question, a D’rlalu named Ensign La’mar, was reviewing sensor archives from a week ago. It was pure luck she spotted it at all. We might not have known about it until it passed us by otherwise.”
“Does it pose a threat to any of our operations?”
“Negative sir. I would recommend the CAG not conduct any orbital exercises until it pasts us but other than that we should be alright.”
“Very good Lieutenant. Get the word to the CAG to give his guys and gals the day off. Meanwhile go ahead and have the gunnery crews set up for some target practice. Might as well have some fun with this thing.”
Chapter 9: The Battle for Dead-Ender One
“I love it when a plan comes together,” Ben observed from the cloaked assault shuttle’s cockpit. The orbital defense platform’s attention was securely focused on the thirty-eight kiloton rock the Yorktown had carefully shifted out of orbit. They were not actively scanning the approach vector the shuttle was coming in on. Not that the GCP Dante would have been easy to spot. It’s Heshe enhanced cloak meant that it would take a minor miracle for her to be detected by the technologies typically available to the Galactic Coalition.
Cat nodded. It had been a bit of a fight to get the Yorktown’s First Officer to agree to allow her to accompany the assault shuttle. Her rank notwithstanding, regulations forbade a senior flag officer from joining a boarding action. It seemed Ben was intent on reminding her of this fact. She pointed out that she and the Yorktown were currently at odds with the GCP. He responded that in disregarding inconvenient regulations she was setting a dangerous example for the rest of the crew. She acknowledged the merits of his argument and then pointed out she was going anyway.
In the end, it was the simple fact that her Heshe enhancements made her almost impossible to kill… and that even should she die, the dedicated fabricators on a WhimPy platform would simply rebuild her body and restore a copy of her memory engrams –that ended the argument… That and the threat to have him thrown in the brig with strict orders to cut off all access to chocolate if he didn’t stop trying to physically block her access to the shuttle. Faced with such dire measures he reluctantly relented.
Cat tied her personal AI into the Yorktown’s AI. “Yorky, are you ready to override the station’s security system?”
“Affirmative Admiral. I will loop their sensor feed for thirty six seconds on your go.”
Cat looked up at the miniature holographic display in the shuttle’s cockpit. The ideal moment was fast approaching.
“Yorky, you have a go,” she said out loud. She turned to face the breaching team. “Let’s have at it boys.”
Marine Sergeant AG Stone grinned. The man enjoyed a fight… and the rougher the odds the more he liked it. That fact that he looked like a kid at Christmas should have concerned the Admiral but in truth she could understand his feelings. For the first time in weeks it seemed as if the Yorktown taskforce was going to actually be able to do something.
AG tapped the two marines who were standing next to the breaching pod and nodded. In unison they lowered the visors on their combat suits and sealed them. Stone’s own visor was already down. His Stark Mark Ten suit was the latest model and featured a number of notable improvements over the Mark Six model he had worn just a few months earlier in another time-line.
The Mark Ten was ridiculously thin and yet the smart fabric that composed the bulk of the suit was impossibly strong and self-repairing. His dead-weight lift capacity with the synthetic muscles built into the suit was well in excess of four thousand pounds. In addition, it featured adaptive camouflage, inertial dampeners, a full medical diagnostics package and a level three AI that could move and control the suit independent of the operator should the operator become incapacitated. All of this in a package that was little more encumbering than a business suit.
As a team the three marines pushed the breaching pod out of the shuttle’s depressurized cargo hold.
The pod itself was little more than a self-attaching airlock with a custom designed nanite payload on the docking ring that glued the lock to the target and actively suppressed any alarms they encountered. The alarm suppression subsystem was not anywhere near foolproof but about thirty percent of the time the breach could be accomplished without the victim being aware.
Cat had ordered the marines to assume the worst and to go in with pointers blazing. The handheld rifles the marines carried were also the latest in available technology. The GCP had greatly enhanced the marines’ standard assault weapon, the pointer, in the several hundred years between Cat’s old timeline and her current one.
The new weapons now carried their own force shields and could offer limited protection to the operator. They also were biometrically synced to their assigned owners and could not be used by a third party without an override code that the rifle’s AI recognized. Finally, while pointers where originally line-of-sight weapons, these newer models were capable of creating shaped plasma conduits around corners. This was achieved by utilizing microscopic clouds of ENOs that created a very temporary optical bridge around a bend. In this mode the Pointer was less powerful and took longer to establish a target lock but the resulting flexibility was a game-changer.
Sergeant Stone pressed an activation button on the breaching pod as his team gently pushed it into the open vacuum. A small puff of compressed gas discharged by the pod’s flight computer nudged the unit towards DE-1 with just enough force to reach the target and accomplish the breaching action in the time window established by Yorky’s surveillance loop.
The marines followed behind like ducklings following their momma. Cat brought up the rear. It was not her preferred assault order but Ben had made it clear that there was only so far her superior rank was going to allow him to overlook his concerns for her personal safety. In the end, she agreed to allow the marines to do what they had been trained to do.
“The pod has reached the target site,” Stone reported. “The little buggers are digging
us a door as I speak.”
Cat continued to monitor the High Orbital’s surveillance chatter but as yet there was no indication that the breach-in-progress had been detected. She was just beginning to think they were going to get lucky when all hell threatened to break loose.
“Ahhh we have issue down here,” Sergeant Stone reported. The breaching pod is having trouble cutting an opening. It seems station has their own defensive nanites that are actively fighting off our little buggers. Our boys are winning but it’s going to take a couple of minutes longer than our plan called for.”
To make matters worse Cat’s eavesdropping finally caught chatter on the security channel about anomalous activity occurring on E-Deck near the outer hull. Cat didn’t need her legendary genius IQ to suspect that E-Deck was in fact the where they were attempting their breach.
She engaged the thrusters built into her belt and flew past the others. On reaching the hull of DE-1 she activated the magnetic grapplers in her boots and walked over to the breaching pod. Reaching down she flooded are area with a swarm of her more sophisticated Heshe nanites. They overwhelmed the station’s defenses and completed the task of securing the breaching pod to the station.
She nodded to Sergeant Stone and he grinned like a little kid at Christmas.
“It’s party time boys!” He barked over his comlink. With that he actuated the iris door on the breaching pod and the assault team entered the now airtight chamber. In less than a minute from when Cat had touched down on the high orbitals exterior hull, they were making their way into the station itself.
Cat was the last one out of the airlock. She slapped a silver disk in her hand onto the wall near the new door the breaching pod had created. The disk adhered to the wall and immediately created a shimmering force field that effectively cloaked the airlock. Anybody walking by would never see it.
“Engage your personal camo fields,” Stone ordered his men. Both Cat and Ben were already fully cloaked.
The Mark Ten Stark suits included special HUD displays that allowed them to see the other members of their team. In addition, they included enhanced audio suppression systems that created waveforms specifically shaped to cancel the sounds associated with cautious movements.
The stealth systems allowed them to literally walk past several GCP soldiers who were rushing towards, what was for them, an unexplained sensor anomaly on E-Deck.
“Ben,” Cat subvocalized. “Take your team and head for weapons control. The sergeant and I are going to take the bridge. Once you’ve locked down the weapons head over to the shuttle bay and see what type of trouble you can get into.”
Ben grinned and gave her a ghostly thumbs up. Even her enhanced vision couldn’t see the gesture because of the cloaking but her Heshe encounter unit fed a fairly realistic computer-generated image directly into her optic nerves.
Stone signaled two of his marines to follow the Commander. The last marine, a young explosives expert named Specialist Alfreda Nobel, followed Cat and the Sergeant over to a Jefferies tube that led up towards the command deck.
The tube was wide enough to allow a human carrying a toolbox (or in the case of Specialist Nobel, a demolition pack), to easily Navigate the shaft. Cat unspooled a nano-fiber tether from her utility belt and passed one end to the Specialist. The younger woman quickly attached it to her belt and then extended her own nano-fiber tether to Sergeant Stone.
A metal ladder hugged one wall. Cat nodded to Sergeant Stone and jumped onto the ladder. She grabbed both sides and began to shimmy up the ladder without bothering to use her feet or the ladder’s rungs. Her arm strength was enough to propel her up at a speed that defied imagination. When she reached the end of her ten foot tether she paused to allow the rest of the team to climb onto the ladder.
“When I start pulling, release your grip and allow me to control the vertical ascent,” Cat signaled through their HUDs. When she received confirmations from the marines below her, Cat began to use her Heshe enhanced strength to pull the others up the ladder behind her. Their weight slowed her down but their overall rate of ascent still far exceeded what the Sergeant and Specialist would have been able to achieve on their own. Cat climbed the remaining three hundred meters to the command deck in less forty-five seconds.
When she reached to sealed hatch that marked their destination she stopped and signaled the others to join her near it.
Sergeant Stone activated special microfilament tarsi pads on the palms of his hands and knees. These minute hair-like fibers allowed his Stark suit to slowly climb the smooth metal walls of the Jefferies tube in a manner not unlike a fly crawling up the side of a window.
Nobel scaled the ladder the last few feet to join the Admiral perched near the sealed hatch. At Cat’s signal she rigged the hinges on the small door with small shaped charges that should be just strong enough to shatter the mechanism. Cat would have preferred to use nanites to accomplish the same task but they would take too long and the risk of losing the element of surprise was too great.
Cat took a small device from her belt pouch and placed it on the metallic surface of the door. It would detect vibrations generated by the small explosive and precisely counter them so that the sound of the hinges rupturing would be dampened to almost nothing. When Specialist Nobel triggered the shaped charges there was a very soft and muted popping noise and that was it.
Cat slowly lifted the hatch away from the door frame. The corridor was clear for the moment. Working quickly, the three Yorktown personnel entered the curved hallway and proceeded to the right after replacing the hatch and covering the damaged area with a cloaking field. If someone remembered there was normally a sealed hatch there, there would be a problem but for the most part, people tended to ignore things that they didn’t use of a regular basis. At least that was Cat’s hope.
Their goal was the station’s bridge which was located one deck up. The Jefferies tube they has been using to covertly navigate the station terminated just prior to the command deck. This meant they had to access the bridge via the turbolift. That portion of the trip represented the highest risk of discovery for the small team because the most effective cloaking technology in the world could not hide you if the elevator you were riding in became crowded. For this reason Cat had decided that they would access the turbolift only after they got to B-deck.
Unfortunately, the Yorktown’s databases did not contain a lot of information regarding B-deck. It was a glaring hole. The fact that the GCP’s data archives were strangely devoid of information screamed something to Cat… she just didn’t know what.
The turbolift to the bridge required a biometric key to enter and another to select the command deck as a destination. Fortunately Cat’s Heshe AI was able to quickly bypass these security measures. Her team entered the lift and headed for the bridge. To anyone watching it would have seemed strange that the turbolift doors opened and closed by themselves. The Yorktown’s assault team was fully cloaked and thus fully invisible.
As the doors slid into their open recesses on the bridge itself Cat got her first view of her objective. Had she been the station’s OIC she would not have been happy.
Chapter 10: Mind Games
JD was still bored. Life had briefly gotten interesting for a few minutes when the station’s AI reported a series of unexplained sensor anomalies on one of the lower decks but the team he had sent to investigate found nothing unusual. In point of fact, his crew was so lackadaisical at this point that routine maintenance was often shoddy. This in turn led to periodic malfunctions which often showed up as little glitches. There had been a time when he would have never tolerated such inefficient behavior in his subordinates but those days had died with his once abundant sense of optimism many years ago. For the moment it was all he could do to arrive at his shift while sober and even that was becoming difficult.
He was sitting sideways in his command chair. He was about halfway through re-reading a paper copy of a quaint science fiction book called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, when t
he turbolift doors opened. He casually glanced over his shoulder to see who was coming up to the bridge deck. As far as he knew the entire shift had reported for duty already – which was in itself a minor miracle. Perhaps the excitement of a NEO encroaching Hupenstanii space had spurred some vestigial sense of duty.
Strangely, he saw no one enter the bridge. The lift doors opened and then closed. Another systems glitch? He thought to himself. He was about to signal engineering when an iron-hard grip grabbed his arm before he could reach forward to toggle the intercom. At the same time three figures shimmered into existence. Two where obviously female and one was a much larger man. For JD, his life was about to become a lot less boring.
“Commander, I’d like to avoid any unpleasantries if I can,” a silver goddess said from his right side. As the woman’s cloaking field dissipated he could see the person holding his arm in a vise-like grip was a redheaded Admiral seemingly in her early thirties. Even isolated for a decade in the deepest backwater of the GCP, JD knew who this must be.
“Cat Kimbridge?”
“That would be Admiral Cat Kimbridge sir,” Sergeant Stone in a gruff voice as he held a fully charged Marine-issued pointer on the two other members of his bridge staff.
Cat nodded to Specialist Nobel and the younger woman waved Commander Dickerson out of his seat to stand with his communications and sensor officers with her own pointer.
Cat took the now vacated command chair and quickly brought up a station status display. The holographic display showed an alarming number of potentially compromised systems flagged in yellow. She looked at Commander Dickerson and raised a single eyebrow.