With Your Shield

by Chris Kennedy

  * * *

  Sixteen hours later, Captain Cole’s crew brought War Pony to a stop near the stargate’s control station, and Colonel Enkh and Captain Cole crossed the remaining distance in one of the dropships. The system had a Class 3 stargate, the smallest and least efficient of the three types; as infrequently as a ship entered or exited the system, nothing more was needed. The dropship pilot brought the craft alongside the station, the station’s crew mated the craft to it, and Sansar and Cole crossed over.

  “Welcome,” the Jeha operating the docking collar said as they floated aboard. “Is there something I can help you with?”

  “Just point us in the direction of the gate master’s office if you would, please,” Sansar said, attaching her magnetic boots to the deck.

  “It is not far up that way,” the alien said, pointing with two of its claws before turning and leaving in the opposite direction.

  “Ready?” Sansar asked.

  “Yeah,” Captain Cole replied. He looked around and shook his head. “I know it’s been a while since I’ve been in a Class 3, and they’re pretty much the bottom of the barrel, but this one…”

  He let his voice trail off, and Sansar took a hard look around. The station had seen better days and looked ill-maintained. Pipes clanked, and Sansar heard what sounded like an air leak in the ducting. It also needed a good cleaning. Oils and fluids coated the walls in a number of places where patches had been hastily applied, something which would quickly have caught a starship captain’s practiced eye.

  “…is pretty grim,” Sansar finished. “I wonder what you have to do wrong to get stationed here?”

  “I don’t know,” Cole said, “but if it looks like I’m going to do it, please stop me. We probably want to keep our helmets close by; there’s no telling if it’s going to implode, explode, or just generally fall apart.”

  They reached the gate master’s office, made obvious by the large golden plaque mounted to the bulkhead outside it. “Jalgoth Xartag, Esquire. Gate Master.” A loud rahhhhh! noise came from the other side of the door. After a second, it repeated, then repeated again.

  “Well, that’s weird,” Sansar said.

  “The noise?” Cole asked. “There’s probably something about to explode on the other side of that hatch.”

  “The noise is odd,” Sansar agreed, “but I was looking at the name on the bulkhead.”

  “What do you mean?” Cole asked.

  “That’s unlike any Sumatozou name I’ve ever seen.”

  “You’re right,” Cole replied. “Non-Sumatozou gate masters are few and far between. I wonder what that means?”

  “No idea,” Sansar said. “Nor do I have any idea what the noise is that’s coming from in there, but there’s only one way to find out.”

  She opened the door and walked into the office to find a humanoid leaning back in a chair behind a large, cheaply replicated desk. The alien had his boots up on the desk and a strap across his pot belly that held him in place. The loud noise was emanating from him, and, based on the evidence, it appeared to be snoring.

  “Excuse me?” Sansar asked.

  The alien continued snoring.

  “Excuse me?” Sansar asked in a louder voice. “Gate Master Xartag?”

  The alien snorted a couple of times then put his boots on the deck, locked them, and took off the strap holding him in place. “What?” he asked in a loud voice. “What is it, and who are you?”

  The alien was a little over two meters in height, with a porcine appearance. His nose was reminiscent of a pig’s snout, and his skin sported the same sort of texture and hair as a pig. As he snorted and sputtered, all he needed were tusks, and he could have been a bipedal boar.

  “I’m Sansar Enkh, the head of the Golden Horde Human mercenary company.” She nodded to Cole. “This is Captain Cole, the commanding officer of EMS War Pony, one of our ships.”

  “Yes? Well, what is it? Can’t you see I’m busy? I’m not due for an inspection for another two years.”

  “We’re not here to inspect the station,” Sansar replied. “We’re just looking for a little information.”

  “Do I look like the GalNet? The fees are the standard ones for a gate of this size, along with a small fee for having to charge the gate since it hasn’t been used in a week. If you aren’t here to inspect the station, get out of my office and off my station. There’s no reason to make your gate-use payment in person. Go back to your ship and do it like normal beings.”

  “That’s not the kind of information we’re looking for,” Sansar said. “We’re looking for information that is a little more…personal in nature.”

  “What are you? Some kind of reporter?” Xartag asked, his voice rising in volume. “The business of my past is none of your business. Get off the station!”

  “I’m not looking for information about you,” Sansar said, holding up her hands. “I’m looking for information on who’s been coming through this system.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of 10,000-credit chits. “I’m willing to pay for it.”

  “Oh,” the gate master said, calming slightly. “Well, that’s different.” A glint of avarice shone in his eyes. “What is it you want to know?”

  “Just what I said. What races have been coming through this system? How often?”

  “I’m sorry, but that information is privileged.”

  “I’m sure it is, and I’m not asking you to give it to me,” Sansar replied. “However…” She shuffled the credit chips, allowing a 100,000-credit chit to come to the top.

  “However?” the gate master asked, his breath coming in shorter gasps as he stared at the large red diamond on the chit.

  “However, if you were to simply read off the log of what races have used the gate in the past year, I might become so enthralled with your lovely voice, that I accidentally let this slip…” The chit came off the pile and floated toward the gate master, who started to reach out for it before Sansar snatched it back.

  “Well…well...let me see,” the gate master said with a grunt as he leaned forward and pulled a slate out of a drawer. “This system isn’t used often, as you can guess, which makes collecting fees for the guild difficult…”

  “I’m sure it does,” Sansar agreed. It also makes it hard for you to collect fees for Jalgoth Xartag, too.

  “It seems that a MinSha mercenary company has been through this system four times in the past year, and…” His voice trailed off, and he pointedly looked at the credit chit.

  Sansar smiled and gave it a push. The gate master caught it and looked back to his slate. “There also appears to have been three uses of the gate by a Besquith mercenary company.”

  Sansar nodded. “Thank you very much,” she said. “You’ve been very helpful.” She turned toward the door.

  “There’s more,” the gate master said, stopping her.

  “More of what?” Sansar asked. “More people using the gate?”

  “No. More information.” He looked pointedly at the pocket where Sansar had put the remaining credit chits.

  “Yes?” Sansar asked, pulling out the handful of 10,000-credit chits.

  “What do you have in your other pockets?” the alien asked. “This information is much more valuable than that.”

  “Is it now?”

  “It is.”

  Sansar reached into a different pocket and pulled out another 100,000-credit chit. She approached the gate master’s desk and held the chit out. Xartag tried to grab it, but Sansar didn’t let go.

  “What is the information?” she asked.

  “I am to tell the leader of the Besquith mercenary company when someone other than those two companies come through here.”

  “You are, are you?” Sansar asked. She let go of the credit chit and stared into the gate master’s eyes. “And what is it going to take to help you forget you saw us?”

  “That I cannot do,” the gate master said as a shiver ran through his body. “You can kill me if you want—it will on
ly be putting me out of my misery in this entropy-cursed black hole in the middle of nowhere. The Besquith, though, he promised to eat me alive, and I believe him. Dead is fine, but that…no.”

  “Very well, then,” Sansar said, understanding the kind of fear a close encounter with a Besquith could generate. She turned to leave, but then turned back. “Did he tell you to report everyone, or just me?”

  “He is interested in anything that passes through the system, but told me about you, specifically. You are a Human, right?”

  “I am.”

  “He is expecting you.” Sansar nodded, and the two Humans left the little office.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Cole said.

  “It is,” Sansar said, deep in thought. “Let’s get back to the ship—there are some things I want to look up.”

  “As quickly as we can,” Cole replied. “Besides, I’m getting hungry and am in the mood for bacon all of a sudden…”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Seventeen

  Horde Transport Ship EMS War Pony, Hyperspace

  Now that the ship was back in hyperspace, the team had gathered in the hangar with the Hoplite CASPer again. The name had caught on with the team, based on what Markus had heard. He approached the drones first. “Okay, I had our CASPer programmers take a look at the code, and we think we’ve solved the problem, so let’s give it another test.”

  Specialist Burke nodded and turned on the small communications laser and transceiver they had set up for testing. Markus scanned the dragonfly drone with his slate and updated the software. After a moment, he set the drone back down and programmed its search pattern on his slate. Once he was done, the drone started flapping its wings. It took off, executed the search pattern it had been given, and flew through the laser beam. It alerted on Markus’ slate that it detected a communications beam and continued flying. He grinned and looked up from his slate.

  “It worked.”

  “Yes!” Burke exclaimed, then she coughed and cleared her throat. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Oh, I think that was very warranted, Specialist. So how many more do we have?”

  “We have 20 more, sir, and I’ve got them all here.”

  Markus nodded. “Was there any indication in the communication traffic that the beam was interrupted?”

  Burke checked her slate for a moment. “No, sir. It’s like it wasn’t even there.”

  “Okay, let’s take things up a notch. Knowing there’s communication happening is nice, but what if we could track its origination point?”

  Burke stared at Markus. “What?”

  “Watch, let’s see if this works. Watch the traffic to make sure the drone isn’t detected.”

  She nodded, and Markus got to work on his slate, programming in a new series of commands, most of which he had pre-programmed; he just had to line them up to execute. The drone turned in the air, repeating its original search pattern. Once it crossed the beam again, it stopped, then flew back across it. Then it started a sphere pattern out from there, crossing the beam at further and further distances along the beam’s path. The software in Markus’ slate kept track of each hit, and, given enough points, was able to calculate the path of the beam. In a real-world situation, it would give him a line of bearing on the location of the originating communications signal. After a dozen or so passes through the beam, it abandoned the spherical search and resumed its normal search pattern.

  “What just happened, sir?”

  “It gave me a map of the coordinates of each time it crossed the beam, and the software drew a nice line that shows the beam’s direction of travel.”

  “So, we could follow it to its source…”

  Markus grinned. “That’s the idea, specialist. We could call in a strike or send in additional drones to see what’s going on. We would know ahead of time what we’re about to hit so we wouldn’t send troopers into an ambush.”

  She nodded. “Hell yes…sir.”

  Markus shook his head. Perhaps the group was spending too much time around Hobo. “Okay, I’m going to give it a longer search pattern to see how it does once the Hoplite fires up.”

  He tapped his slate, and the dragonfly flew across the room and started executing the grid pattern he’d programmed. He nodded in satisfaction and walked over to the CASPer where Volk, Hobo, and Kawa waited.

  Markus looked up at the cockpit. “Ready to give this another try?”

  Kawa nodded. “Yes, sir. We’ve got the same setup as last time, and of course, we should clear the room.”

  Hobo nodded while he made sure everyone was out and the door secured before he came back to the group. “Okay, let’s get this done.”

  Markus climbed up into the CASPer, slid his helmet on, and hooked up the leads from the mech to his pinplants. The rest of the team moved behind the radiation shielding and readied the emergency shutoff.

  “Spartan, ready for startup,” he sent over the comms.

  “Go for startup, Spartan,” Hobo replied.

  The CASPer fired to life, and Markus checked all his telltales. Everything showed green with no negative effects from the emergency shutdown. “Spartan ready to activate additional sensors.”

  Kawa responded, “Go ahead, Spartan. Let’s do it.”

  Markus activated the extra sensors and waited. After a minute, and not being shut down, he activated the sensor pickups in the cockpit and they added into his display.

  “Looking good out there?”

  Kawa responded, and Markus could hear the smile on his face, “It’s looking great, Spartan. Energy flow is high, as I expected, but no surges at all, and everything is running nice and level.”

  Markus grinned as he looked at the sensor display and pointed the arm of the CASPer.

  “Uhh, what are you doing, Spartan?” Hobo asked.

  “Well,” Spartan said, “if my sensors are right, I’m tracking the dragonfly’s electronic emissions.”

  Volk’s jaw dropped, as did Hobo’s. Kawa squinted, looking up at the CASPer’s arm, finally muttering. “Holy shit…you did it.”

  “We did it, Kawa. We did it. Going to check the drone’s feed to see if the sensors are interfering with it.”

  Markus changed his focus and pulled up the drone’s output. There was indeed some interference, but honestly, he didn’t care as long as his emissions weren’t damaging the drone. He’d have the tech team run diagnostics to check for that later. There was no need for the drone at this range. The drone would be doing its job much farther away, which he couldn’t really test until they got down to the planet.

  “Well, as I figured it might, the drone is affected by the sensors’ output, but I don’t see that as a problem as long as there’s no long-term damage to the drone’s equipment. How are the radiation levels, Kawa?”

  “Oh, right…ummm. Looks fine, actually. I have detectors all around the room, and it looks like if you stayed close to it for a long period of time…like, for years, there would be the potential for some radiation problems, but it doesn’t seem like it’ll be an issue.”

  “Okay, I’m going to shut it down. Hobo, get Specialist Burke back in here to run some diagnostics on the drone. I want to know if it was damaged by the sensors.”

  Markus powered down the CASPer and climbed out. Specialist Burke was already coming back into the room. He grabbed his slate and tapped a sequence that caused the drone to return ‘home,’ which was the workbench where it had started. The drone powered off, and Burke went to work with her slate.

  She looked up after a few minutes. “Looks good. No negative impacts.”

  The assembled group nodded, and Markus scratched his head. “Okay, we’ll spend the rest of the time in hyperspace running more tests to make sure everything is where we want it. Thanks everyone, great work!”

  Markus motioned for Hobo to join him and they walked out of the hangar. Hobo followed and closed the door behind him. “What’s up, Spartan?”

  “I’m going to be doing a little sim time with Irish
’s squad since they’ll be accompanying me in the testing of the Hoplite, so keep the team on task.”

  Hobo nodded. “Yes, sir. No problem.”

  Markus clapped him on the back and headed back to his quarters.

  * * *

  A few days later, Irish and his squad gathered for their next simulator session. His team had just noticed that there was an extra CASPer when Markus came in with his new customized helmet under his arm. “Sorry folks,” he said. “I hope I’m not late.”

  The assembled group looked puzzled except for the corporals and a few of the sergeants who already knew him. Some had fought with him before.

  Hazard cleared his throat, getting everyone’s attention. “Glad you could make it, Spartan.”

  “Sure thing, Hazard. Hey, folks.” He shook the hands of those he knew.

  “For those who don’t know,” Hazard said, “this is Lieutenant Markus ‘Spartan’ Nicolos. Spartan is in charge of a project that’s currently being developed, which we will be testing on Kelfor. Anything you can brief them on, Spartan?”

  Spartan nodded to those he did not know. “Nice to meet you all. I’ll brief you on what I can, but you need to understand that it doesn’t leave this room. Colonel Enkh would like to keep this quiet for now.

  “We’re working on a new variant of our CASPer, code named ‘Hoplite.’ This mech has almost double the sensor capability of our current scout CASPer. Enough to detect…very small electronic signatures. It is also capable of remotely deploying small scout drones and pulling their data when they return to the CASPer for download. Other capabilities are still being researched.”

  There were a few low whistles.

  “Sir?” Dusty inclined his head.

  “Go ahead, Dusty.”

  “Is that what you’ll be using in the sim today, sir?”

  “Negative. The specs aren’t programmed into the simulation software, because honestly, we won’t know everything it’s capable of until we have it on the planet. So, for today, I’ll be using my standard loadout. This is just an opportunity to see how your squad works. I also want to make clear, this is Irish’s show. I’m not taking command of the squad, though when we’re deployed on planet and you’re supporting my testing operations, I may have specific requests for you. Even then it will be up to Irish whether or not he feels like it’s a safe move.”