“Copy that, sir,” Briggs said. “Weapons team loading all tubes now. They are sealing inner doors. All tubes ready. Open outer doors?”
Sheen looked at the main holo-stage and the hazy image of the Skarak warship. The drone’s sensor range now extended to the far end of the Skarak ship. The Skarak was moving in toward the Scorpio System at pace but was still several astro-units from the edge of the Sphere.
As the warship moved in, a new pair of signals was detected alongside the first—both in flanking positions and holding a few hundred kilometers back.
As the three Skarak warships moved in, another new signal came into detection range, moving in formation behind them. It filled the sensor field of the many sensor drones deployed ahead of the Ultimatum. The drones gathered hundreds of petabytes of data a second, but the image was still indistinct. It was clearly a huge structure, the size of a small moon, but its outer hull was impossible to detect with accuracy. The image of the vast ship flickered and shimmered on the holo-stage.
“Open outer doors,” Sheen said. He grabbed hold of the dry end of white root and twirled it around in his mouth.
Commander Jacqueline Briggs had been with Captain Sheen long enough to recognize this sign of agitation. It was a minor hint and not obvious from looking at him that he was concerned, but twirling that short stick was a dead giveaway to her.
“Set payload,” Briggs called to the operator at the weapons console, “maximum yield. Communications, ready a message for Union Fleet Headquarters on Terra. Launch a communication drone and prepare to dispatch.”
Sheen watched the huge ship. It was unlike anything the fleet had detected in any of their encounters with the Skarak. As far as the drones could detect, the ship was a single dark oval bristling with stiff rapiers projecting in all directions, but the surface of the ship was proving impossible to scan with any precision.
The fleet needed to know about this. Sheen knew he could not run until he had more information, but running dark and using only passive scans, he could learn little other than the new ship’s physical dimensions.
But a well-placed combat drone would reveal more data from its detonation than could be picked up on passive scan. The only problem was that the launch would light up the Ultimatum like a small sun. It would be impossible to hide once he’d launched. After that, he could only fight or run.
“Bring the reactor online. Get us underway, Briggs, but keep that big Skarak ship on the edge of sensor range. We don’t want to outpace them, not just yet.”
Briggs issued the orders to the various operators around the command deck and then walked over to the holo-stage and stood to one side. She looked over her right shoulder at Sheen up in his command chair.
“Target the warships in sensor range with a combat drones, but save one for that huge mastership,” Sheen said.
“Two combat drones per Skarak warship,” Briggs said. She tapped the image of the warships on the holo-stage, marking them for the targeting systems. “And one for the mastership.” She tapped the huge dark image covering one side of the holo-image. “Standing by for combat drone launch. We had better be ready to move once we fire. They will attack us for sure.”
As Sheen stood up in his command chair, his finger raised, poised to give the fire order, the image vanished.
“Signal from all sensor drones lost, Captain,” Briggs said.
Sheen sat down. “They’ve found the sensor drones.”
“We are blind,” Briggs said. She tapped away at the console at the edge of the holo-stage.
“Not for long,” Sheen said. “They will be in range of our onboard sensor array any moment, I expect.”
No sooner had he said it than the holo-stage was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of signals, all moving in on the Ultimatum at high speed. The sensor console chirped with the detection of every new signal, creating a constant stream of noise.
“Skarak fighters,” Briggs said, moving to the weapons console and standing alongside a nervous-looking weapons operator.
“All systems, full power.” Sheen pulled the white root from his mouth and dropped it. “Stability field to full. Deflection shields angle to protect the Ultimatum’s drive section. Full power to the drive. Retarget drones, give us a detonation curtain to cover our retreat. All weapons, fire at will, release manual targeting to gun crews.”
The swarm of Skarak fighters swept in on the Ultimatum as she accelerated up to maximum drive, diving toward the outer edge of the Sphere. The forwardmost of the fighter swarm closed into weapons range just as the wave of combat drones detonated.
The antimatter eruptions from the drones ballooned across dark space, each creating a small and short-lived star. The spread of drones created a billowing plasma fire that merged into a huge plasma wall between the Ultimatum and the Skarak fighters.
The few Skarak fighters to make it through raced toward the Union cruiser. They ran into a barrage of spitz gun fire, rapid-fire energy pulses streaming out from the cruiser, strafing the attackers and destroying one fighter after another.
The remaining fighters closed in and fired their blue crackle beams just as the Ultimatum activated its high-energy laser and mass beam. The energy weapons flickered past each other in the black of space. A laser sliced clean through a Skarak fighter. The beam vanished before reactivating and connecting with a new target. That too was ripped apart. The Ultimatum’s mass beam connected with the closest Skarak fighter, causing it to collapse under its own weight, crushed down to the size of a Skarak soldier’s skull in a second. Blue energy lines burst from the fighter as it collapsed.
A Skarak crackle beam slammed into the cruiser’s angled deflector shield, the beam twisting and flickering about before the ship emitting it was crushed by fire from the cruiser’s mass beam.
Sheen stood up and looked at the holo-image of the billowing wall of plasma fire thrown up by the combat drones. It was beginning to fade, but before it cooled and dissipated, it was flung aside as the huge Skarak mastership pushed through, plasma fire flickering off its hundreds of kilometers long rapiers.
“Get us out of here,” Sheen said.
The blue beam that burst out from the mastership enveloped the Ultimatum entirely, arcing around the deflection shield angled over the rear section. The blue crackle lines arched back and connected with the cruiser’s nose section. The forward composite exploded and boiled away into the vacuum of space.
“All drones, target that mastership. Maximum yield. All power to the drive, we have to get this data back to fleet.”
“We are losing power,” Briggs said as she ran to the engineering section. “Reactor is offline.”
The holo-stage flickered and the image vanished, making the dark gray holo-stage base look bland and useless. Then the lights went out across the command deck before emergency lighting flickered on.
A distant, dull thump and clunk from the outer composite hull sounded like something grabbing hold. Sheen looked at his wrist-mounted holo-stage still drawing power from its own independent power cell. He extended the sensor range to max, just about taking it beyond the upper hull only a few dozen meters above his head.
A large object was over his ship.
Sheen pulled a fresh stick of white root from his jacket’s breast pocket and a pulse pistol from the small recess in his command chair armrest, then he opened a communication channel.
“This is the captain. Arm yourselves. Every member of the Ultimatum company and crew will fight,” Sheen said. “Kill every Skarak you can. Don’t let yourself be taken alive. Sheen out.”
Climbing down from his chair and taking a cover position, weapon aimed at the command deck entrance, Sheen made ready to defend his command.
A blue flickering light appeared and filled the command deck, spreading down from the ceiling, over the bulkheads and then across the deck. The blue lines began turning white as they crept over every surface in a jerking motion. Sheen heard the brief yells of pain from his command deck crew as the first white line touch
ed his boot. He yelled briefly, and the white root dropped from his drooling mouth.
2
Will Boyd floated a meter above the reactor in the drive room and studied the problem. He had worked on the reactor for two days straight and the shunt was still not delivering power to the many sub-systems of the Faction raider, the Odium Fist. He had tried everything short of a big hammer and some cursing.
The Fist was adrift in an upper density layer of the gas giant Extremis. The ship’s density was almost perfectly matched to the density of the surrounding gas and she moved like a submarine through the stream that circled the massive gas giant.
All was quiet, except for Boyd’s regular grunts of exertion and shouts of frustration as he tried to bring the power systems back online.
The Fist had orbited Extremis three times since first plunging into the atmosphere. Drifting unpowered, the Fist was being tugged and swept along by the winds of the density stream.
An external sensor, running off an independent power cell, reported that the Fist was about to contact the bottom boundary layer of the stream. She was drifting downward like a feather in a breeze and had connected with the lower boundary layer several times already. Boyd couldn’t be sure the old ship could take many more encounters with that layer. He took hold of the reactor cap below him and pulled himself down. He gripped as tightly as he could and listened to the countdown as the Fist dropped, centimeter by centimeter, to the layer below.
The impact was violent—not for the speed the Fist carried but due to the much higher speed of the lower density layer. The winds kicked the Fist back up, violently repelling it and sending the raider tumbling up to where it was swept along again.
Boyd gripped tight, his knuckles white, as the Fist cartwheeled through the gas until friction slowed it and the Fist settled, again drifting like driftwood on an ocean current. The Fist immediately began to fall again. It would be many hours before it drifted down to the boundary layer again. Boyd hoped he could get the ship started before that happened. Sooner or later, the collision with the lower boundary would catch the Fist in a delicate spot and do some critical damage. Tough as the old raider was, she couldn’t take much more of this.
Boyd relaxed his grip on the reactor cap and let himself drift. With the Fist’s power offline and the ship in virtual freefall, gravity was less than five percent standard, even given that the ship was inside the atmosphere of the gas giant.
Boyd reconnected the conduit and crossed his fingers. Hopefully this time, it would work. He knew enough about ship systems to be able to perform the basic essential repairs, but this was a core transfer problem and surely needed a week in drydock and team of qualified engineers to fix it. He was a great pilot and a brave warrior, but he was feeling a little out of his comfort zone.
“Comfort zone,” he said to himself with a dry laugh as he made the final connections. “When has being on an undercover operation in the Faction included any kind of comfort zone?”
Boyd flipped the cover in place and flipped the switch. He closed his eyes in fear that the reactor would explode. Pointless, he knew. If the reactor exploded, he would have no more than a nanosecond to regret it before the Fist and everything within it, and within a hundred meters of it, was turned into a super-heated ball of plasma.
Realizing that he was still alive, he opened his eyes. He grinned as the lights across the reactor housing chamber flickered on. He yelled in victory and joy that he had fixed the ship. Then the sound of a distant alarm echoed along the corridors of the Fist.
A fire alarm.
Boyd swung down from the reactor cap and floated out of the drive room hatch into the corridors of the Fist. With gravity so low, he was able to fly along the corridor with occasional flicks of his fingertips on the deck, throwing himself up and forward in long arcs.
The flicker of the fire lighting up the bulkhead of the corridor showed Boyd it was coming from the main supply locker. Boyd bounded forward. All the supplies were in there. He had no intentions of starving to death down here in the clouds of Extremis.
Spinning around the open hatch into the main store locker, Boyd saw Thresh. She was in her medical gown, a med-pack on her ankle falling away, its black tendrils still attached to her ankle wound. The med-pack on her head wound still in place. She had a fire suppressor unit in her hands and was directing it at the fire. The unit delivered a huge blast of suppressant that sent her flying back in the opposite direction.
She collided with Boyd, her gown floating about loosely. Her hair drifted up and around, wafting across Boyd’s face. He gripped her around her waist and held her steady. She glanced back over her shoulder at Boyd, her hair moving in floating waves.
“Brace,” she said as she turned back to the fire and gave another blast with the suppressor.
Boyd held out his arms and gripped the frame of the hatch, holding Thresh in place with his body. His feet floated just above the deck.
Thresh pushed herself forward and moved in toward the fire that was eating away at a stack of ration blocks. She moved in and gave another blast, finally beating the flames. Only a drifting black wisp of smoke from the charred mass of ration blocks remained. She delivered a final blast of suppressor before abandoning the extinguisher. It drifted away and dropped slowly to the deck.
Thresh turned, her gown floating around her as she turned. She moved gracefully, her hair floating around her head, but her face looked like thunder and she turned the storm onto Boyd.
“What do you think you are doing to my ship?” she said. “I told you to leave the reactor to me.”
Boyd’s jaw dropped. “I fixed the shunt, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but you didn’t close off all the distribution nodes. That’s why this one erupted. You’re lucky it wasn’t one in the ordnance magazine. If one of the high-ex hail rounds had gone up, we’d both be choking on Extremis atmosphere about now.”
“I had to try, Thresh,” Boyd said. He drifted over to her. “You are still not fit for work and we can’t just float here until we run out of air.” He wrapped an arm around her to move her away from the smoldering mess of ration blocks and the burned-out distribution node.
Thresh slung an arm over his shoulder. “Lucky for you I was up,” she said. “I needed a drink.”
“I made sure you had a hydration pack before I went to the drive room,” Boyd moved her gently out into the corridor and back toward the small med-bay.
“I don’t mean hydration. I wanted some flavor too.”
“Hydration is all you need, and rest. You are nearly recovered. Just give the med-packs a few more hours.”
Boyd knew Thresh needed more than a few med-packs, but it was all they had. She had taken a beating at the Battle of Kalis LZ, but she was resilient, if a little too headstrong. If Boyd hadn’t sedated her that first day, she would have worked on the Fist’s damaged systems herself.
The ship had also taken a beating, having narrowly escaped destruction by the Union and the Skarak. The moon of Kalis had turned from a carnival to a bloodbath, and Boyd had been in the middle of it all. He was still a little surprised that he had come through unscathed.
Boyd laid Thresh down on the med-pod, the cover moved up over her ankles. The med-pack that had been clinging on by a few fine threads was removed by the mechanical tentacles of the med-pod cover and replaced by another. Her ribs and shoulder also received treatment.
“Just leave the power systems alone,” Thresh said. Her eyelids dropped as Boyd administered a sedative.
“I’ll wait for you,” he said. “Just another few hours and you’ll be able to swing a wrench again.”
Her eyes fell shut as the pod cover slid up and over her completely. The milky cover just allowed Boyd to see through to the feisty young woman lying beneath. She was bold and brave, and possibly the best engineer Boyd had ever worked with. And she was beautiful. If the med-pod cover hadn’t been in place, Boyd felt sure he would have leaned over and kissed her full, pale lips.
&nbs
p; But Boyd knew he could never be close to her. Grudging respect was all she could have from him. She was Faction, so she was his enemy. He was a Union Blue Star Marine on an undercover operation to locate the leader of the Faction and assist in his capture.
Boyd checked Thresh was asleep. He needed her fit if he was going to get the Fist out of the clouds of Extremis. But right now, he needed her out of the way so he could launch a sensor probe up through the clouds and into orbit. Things had been frantic at the Battle of Kalis LZ and he needed to make a report to his boss. With power restored to the Fist, and Thresh sedated, he could.
Boyd placed his hand on the med-pod cover just above Thresh’s chest.
“Take it easy, Enke,” he said quietly. His gaze lingered on her for a moment, her chest rising and falling gently as she slept and her eye lashes flickered, dancing in some dream.
Boyd pushed himself off the pod and out of the med-bay into the corridor. He drifted along toward the flight deck and the sensor console.
The flight deck was dark, lit only by the emergency lights. It was cold, and a sparkling frost layer covered everything.
The sensor console was unpowered save for the single green light at the top right corner indicating it was receiving power. Boyd tapped the console and it lit up.
He needed a small amount of power from the core, more than he could get from an independent power supply, so he opened the probe outer doors and made ready to launch. Considering his options, Boyd activated the main holo-stage and brought up a flickering image of the Odium Fist, showing her orientation to the planet. She was tumbling lazily. He waited until the spin presented the probe launch tube to the upper layers of atmosphere. With the tube pointing straight up, he launched.
The probe punched its way up through the atmosphere and gained orbit in a few minutes.
Boyd set the probe on passive scan mode and searched for any Union ships that might be in the area. Finding nothing, he then searched for Faction ships. Then Skarak ships. The area was quiet, like any battlefield once the guns fell silent—quieter than it had ever been before, as if the ghosts of the lost dampened all sounds to total quiet.
Blue Star Marine Boxed Set Page 26