Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework

by Randolph Lalonde

  “How much to get the codes for that network?” Jake asked. All the Warlord crew members were standing up and getting ready to leave, Ashley and Minh-Chu included.

  “You’ll pay me back,” Captain Berkovitz said. “Here are the codes, good luck.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Jacob Valent said.

  Chapter 48

  Falling Skies

  Oz flinched as another ship glanced off the energy shield above and crashed into the landing pad to his left. Fires raged to the west, and everywhere else there were collisions and chaos as thousands of vessels tried to travel without Navnet to guide them. The pods were still dropping, making matters much worse.

  From their stationary positions, their fighters fired particle weapons and solid round cannons at the pods whenever they could get a clear shot, but only a few pilots could claim credit for blowing any of them apart in the air. Alaka’s son fired from the top of the hangar, sending beams of deadly light into the sky.

  “We have it,” announced Ayan through Oz’s command and control system. “We’re broadcasting our own Navnet signal, and we’ll be covering the whole port.”

  He checked and saw that Skyguard Navnet, the name someone in the bunker decided on, was up and running. “Now that’s a public service,” he said. The difference wasn’t apparent overhead yet, and he guessed it wouldn’t be for several seconds, perhaps longer.

  He looked down into the crater where several technicians inspected the two storey tall pod. “This is one of the small ones, it looks like,” one of them reported, tapping the three metre wide drop ship.

  “I can see that,” Oz replied. “Any life signs?”

  “Power systems seem to be running, but that’s all. No life signs. It almost looks like a grave buoy.”

  “What? Why?”

  “There are bones inside. Metallic, loaded with dormant nanobots and some kind of materializer tech.”

  “Get out of there! Move it!” Oz said. He looked to Alaka. “Frameworks. Regenerating soldiers.”

  The technicians were halfway up the incline when the sides of the drop pod fell open, revealing ten black boxes per side. “Spread out around the edges of the crater and open fire!” Oz ordered.

  “On what?” asked one of the soldiers.

  The boxes were flung onto the ground around the drop pod, their lids splitting open to reveal silver coloured bones within. “Get moving! Start shooting at those boxes, now!”

  Most of the unit moved as they were ordered, but some stood dumbly trying to figure out the situation. He’d tried to train them, but some of the mercenaries had been on their own for too long, and weren’t used to following orders without questioning every detail.

  Oz adjusted the power of his rifle to the highest pulse setting and activated his slug clip before opening fire on the nearest box. There was enough room in each of the black containers for a pile of bones, not for a man or woman. The framework soldiers began forming moments later, surprising and disgusting the soldiers gathering around the pit. Many of them stopped firing.

  “Shoot at them until they stop forming!” Oz said. His target was flying to pieces as flesh rose from silver bones. The bones themselves were what he was going for, and it took several shots to blast them apart. He didn’t see progress until he managed to reduce the skull to splinters, then it stopped regenerating. It took half the energy in his rifle, and an entire slug clip.

  “Grenade!” he shouted as he tossed three grenades down into the centre of the pit. The few soldiers who were still fighting at close range made a run for the edge of the crater. They had plenty of time to get out of the way. The explosions bought them some time. The frameworks’ progress was slower with their bones cast apart. If they were separated from the bulk of their bodies, the skulls started regenerating the bone structure, which seemed to slow them down a great deal. The pod was barely damaged.

  Alaka cut two fully-formed, muscled male soldiers in half as they tried to climb to the edge. One of Oz’s soldiers was dragged into the crater. The attacking framework was disabled, taking several shots to the head. Another picked up the soldier and threw him into the middle of the drop pod, where a matter-to-energy recycler in the centre worked to eat through his armour, flashing brightly and humming loudly. Metal arms clasped him to the centre of the open pod, industrial cutters working on opening his armour. As Oz fought to disable the frameworks standing in the way, the soldier was torn to pieces by the converter.

  The pod began to use materializers to create weaponry where the framework boxes had been, and the mobile frameworks reached for armaments instead of charging for Oz’s soldiers on the edge of the crater. He looked to Alaka, who was busy grabbing a framework soldier by the face, breaking his neck and throwing him over his shoulder where the second line of soldiers opened fire on him. Fourteen Triton warriors shot the regenerating framework to pieces but it still took nearly a minute for them to reduce their enemy to the point that it could regenerate no more.

  “We’re going to lose this,” Oz told Alaka. “Explosives, we have to re-crater this crater.”

  The nafalli nodded. “Cover me.”

  Oz slapped his last solid round clip into his rifle and took aim at a framework soldier who was claiming a fresh handgun from the pod. He shot the gun first, then started pouring rounds into the thing’s head. It took eleven hits to reduce the thing’s cranium to bits, and the body began regenerating right away. Oz had to move on to the next target.

  “Cover Alaka!” he cried, firing one burst after another at the emerging frameworks. They were over a hundred versus less than fifty, and the barrels of some of Oz’s soldiers weapons were beginning to glow red thanks to their ceaseless rate of fire. Alaka batted frameworks aside, and threw two over everyone’s heads so they landed in the open in front of the second line.

  When he arrived at the base of the drop pod, he shoved a three kilogram explosive pack into the weapon rack, setting the shape of the charge so it focused the damage on the pod while he dodged the grasping metal arms attached to the matter recycler. “Fire in the hole!” Alaka shouted as he leapt free of the crater.

  Oz shouted, “Everyone back!” as he turned and ran.

  He managed to make it less than a dozen steps before he was struck by the force of the explosion and thrown off his feet. His shields and inertial dampers protected him from the blast. His headgear blacked out, protecting him from going blind from the accompanying flash.

  One of his soldiers, Private Lani Serra, was in stasis after losing a leg and her arm up to the elbow. She was halfway up the creater when the bomb went off. Medics were already checking in as he looked at her status. She would be all right.

  The people who stood near the edge of the crater but weren’t in heavy armour were being treated by their suits for minor injuries ranging from broken fingers and ribs to legs and arms. Soldiers in heavy armour were spared. He wished they had enough extreme environment or heavy combat armour to go around, but that wasn’t the situation. They were desperately short.

  Alaka helped Oz to his feet and they looked back at the crater. A white and red glow emanated from within, and when he got close enough, he could see that there was nothing left of the pod or the frameworks. The explosion left a crater within the crater where several metres of earth had been either vaporised or melted. “I think we got ‘em,” Alaka said.

  “How many of those charges do we have?” Oz asked.

  “Three.”

  Oz queried their new Navnet system, checking on how many pods made it to the ground and his heart sank when he saw the result. Forty-two made it to Port Rush city and the shanty port without taking fire. They were all open and powered up. “We’re going to need a few more if we want to win this.”

  Navnet squawked an alert and Oz looked into the sky where it pointed. A massive fireball streaked across the sky, leaving a thick white trail behind. He couldn’t make out the shape well, but Navnet told him it was a half-kilometer long destroyer named The Jonestown. “Someon
e forgot to hit the destruct switch when their ship was headed into the atmosphere. That’s going to hit with its hull intact.”

  “Will our shield hold?” asked Alaka calmly.

  “It won’t come down close enough to do damage here, but Chomro, the continent across the sea to the west is in trouble,” Oz brought Ayan up on the comm. “You see this?”

  “I do. It’ll send a shockwave across Chomro. We’ll see waves reaching a hundred fifty or so metres high, far from us, but Ruby is happy she moved her ship. Other ships are in failing orbits. I’m watching.”

  “What is our Carthan friend saying about his fleet?” Oz asked.

  “We’re on our own,” Ayan replied.

  * * *

  After rifling through the lockers, bins, and upper compartments of the Freeground faster than light craft, Alice decided on the best equipment. A pair of admiral-level command units were slapped onto each of her arms. A high durability infantry command and control unit was slapped onto her left arm with the optional extended suite.

  The wormhole reaching the outer Rega Gain system was compressed enough so she could start watching news about Jacob, Ayan, Oz, and everyone else from Freeground. “What a find!” she exclaimed when the long list of stories about Ayan Rice and the few stories about Jacob came up. There were hours of footage, and she watched it all while rummaging through the craft.

  She used another comm unit to spray a fresh vacsuit onto herself, and when she was prompted for the colour she thought for a moment. “I think powder blue is my favourite colour now, interesting.” A regular infantry vacsuit was put on overtop, and over that she slipped into a H.A.M.E.S., a Heavy Armour Mechanized Encounter Suit. When it engaged, it felt like it clamped onto her firmly - worryingly so at first - and then it learned to move with her.

  The whole suit was a centimeter thick at the largest parts, but it weighed two hundred forty kilograms because of its density and the equipment built into it. After it finished powering on, she spun in place. “Moves like I’m naked, and doesn’t look like much more than a really old Freeground safety suit. They’ve come a long way.” The shield systems, antigravity pulse barrier, and strength components were all ready to go. Instructions played in the head’s up display on how to use its features. She watched them in high speed.

  Alice looked at the optional shell, with its metal plates and knight-like helmet and shook her head. “Too tacky.” The weapons were a whole other thing.

  Hours passed as she travelled to the Rega Gain system, examining all the literature that went with the weapons, the ammunition, and laughed at the military demonstration recordings. It was a new thing, explosions made her giggle.

  At long last, she settled on an XO-99, the most powerful rifle Freeground ever made. There was only one in the shuttle. It asked for an access code the moment she picked it up, and she impatiently connected with it using her framework interface.

  “Well, I still understand this stuff, that’s nice,” she said as she hurriedly cracked the code and added herself to the database of authorized users, deleting everyone else. The weapon powered on, drawing a base charge from her vacsuit’s excess energy storage.

  The weapon was light, but one point four metres long. It could fire energy rounds and had two barrels for other types of projectiles. “I don’t know if I’ll need this stuff, but I’d rather have it than not,” she said as she strapped on two sidearms, one energy-based and another that fired tiny blades that were intended to cut into flesh then burst. The rounds could also explode against a harder object.

  A large armoured equipment pack came next. She shoved all the explosive ammunition she could find for her new rifle, including combo explosive and EMP rounds made to kill Eden Fleet robots. A tube the size of her forearm contained a portable shelter for four, another contained a high-grade medical system that looked like a body bag, and she hacked the explosives closet for a selection of grenades and portable shields.

  When she was finished she’d packed the metre-tall armoured pack with all the gear, food and ammunition that would fit. She didn’t neglect the sellables, either. Small comm units that could spray a vacsuit or two filled a pocket, something she knew she could get good credits for. A couple of sidearms were packed in for good measure; weapons were always a great hit with the traders. She strapped two Freeground Marine D9 rifles to the outside of the pack just in case the new and improved one she’d adopted turned out to be cheap and junky.

  The news feeds came to an end, and she checked her comm to make sure there weren’t any more. To her surprise, there was a sudden stop to all news entries. Alice looked for more details and found a final broadcast from one of the better Stellarnet news outlets. “The Order of Eden are here in force, with the largest colony, combat, and cultivation ship we’ve seen since the end of the Third Era. Is this the end of freedom in this solar system? This newscaster isn’t waiting to find out. Evacuate, find your way to one of the core worlds, where you can still find democracy, or a gathering of organized souls. This is Marc Bowman, wishing you luck.”

  That was the end of the broadcast, there was nothing else in the stream from that outlet. “At least he left in style. A wimpy, gutless style, but he’s a newscaster. He’d probably wet himself if I put a gun in his hand.”

  Alice checked the cockpit displays to ensure that everything was set for a good wormhole exit. The ship’s energy reserves were at full, and everything was functioning well. She lay a hand on a data port built into the console and connected to the ship. In seconds, she programmed a script that would bring shields up, scan for Navnet, listen for distress signals, and begin plotting a course to Tamber with the help of any friendly navigational systems in range. None of the ship’s weapons could be automatically fired; they all had to be operated manually, so she left them alone. “Wouldn’t do much good, anyway,” she said to herself as she finished programming the computer.

  The ship emerged from the wormhole and Alice activated the control script. The Rega Gain Navnet system was down, and the entire solar system was marked as a war zone. She took the flight controls and piloted the ship manually, burning the thrusters hard.

  With a thought, she plotted a short-jump wormhole and activated the generators. In the blink of an eye she was transported to the inner system, on the edge of Tamber space, and she was immediately tasked with guiding the ship around several large wrecks. Looming in the distance was Skydock, the largest space station in the solar system. Most of its lights were out, but there was little sign of damage to the main facing of the structure. As she came around a wrecked Carthan destroyer, the Vindicta, she started seeing the damage. The station had been struck from the rear. Entire sections were melted inwards, indicating intense nuclear blasts at close range.

  Combat alerts began popping up on her console and in her mind as Tamber came into view. There were hundreds of fighters out there, and they were looking for targets. Alice shunted more power to shields, set the thrusters to maximum, and headed for the nearest cover.

  Several minor shots were deflected as she raced between dead starships. She set her scanners to start looking for the Samson, the Clever Dream, and the Triton. Nothing came up, but she let them continue searching. There was no point in being disappointed, she didn’t have time for it.

  Her ship emerged from behind a half-destroyed carrier called the Oslo and was immediately raked with explosive rounds. Alice watched her shields deplete to seventy one percent, nowhere near critical, but she was in trouble. There were five fighters moving to engage her directly. Tamber’s blue and brown surface was growing in the distance.

  “Gotta go, gotta go, it’s right there, I can almost touch it,” she said under her breath as she worked hard at the controls, forcing the shuttle into extreme evasive manoeuvres through the frame of a massive dry dock facility for large starships. The fighters behind her had no regard for the structure, and fired regardless of the collateral damage.

  She wished she could flip end over end and fire back, but none of
the weapons would allow her to control them remotely. Alice gritted her teeth as rounds peppered the rear of the ship, reducing the charge of her shields to twenty one percent.

  The atmosphere of Tamber was so close. Alice shunted all the reserve power to shields and programmed the wormhole generator to punch a hole through the outer atmosphere. It was risky, plotting compression through atmosphere; the shuttle wasn’t designed for it. At the relative speed she was travelling, going from the vacuum of space into an atmosphere was like colliding with a wall.

  The transfer circuits between the reserve power systems and the shields burned out. There would be no more extra power for the shields, and they weren’t regenerating fast enough to take fire from her pursuers. Alice spun the shuttle around so she could slow down. Rounds rained down on her as the fighters passed by, reducing her shields to twelve percent.

  “Oh God, I hope this works, I’m too young to die,” she said as she engaged the shields on her vacsuit and activated the wormhole generator. The inertial dampers burned out the moment she emerged from the wormhole into the atmosphere. The explosion of her ship breaking the sound barrier as soon as she exited was so loud it registered on her helmet’s head’s up display as dangerous sound. She could see the nose of the vessel had crumpled part way in, destroying most of her sensor suite.