Battleborn

by Andrew Beery

  “Roger that, not-to-be-called-princess Tange.”

  There was a soft chuckle from the other side of the comm link.

  “You’re impossible.”

  “I certainly try,” was my response. “Tange, about Medical?”

  “Yes. I’m there now. It looks like the power is on. The facility seems to be in pristine shape. I suspect Arquat’s robotic minions may have spent some time fixing it up.”

  That last didn’t surprise me at all.

  “I need you to look for a couple of high back chairs with some type of helmet assembly attached to them.”

  “I have them. They appear to be some type of diagnostic equipment. Why the interest?”

  ***

  A day later every one of us had been through the wringer with the teaching device. It worked as advertised but the cost was a massive headache at a minimum. For some reason the Princess, Thompson and I were the worst affected. Each of us lost consciousness for a few hours.

  We each received a much broader understanding of the ship and its operation. It wasn’t long before we had Arquat in all his holographic glory back with us.

  We began to fix the ship in earnest. Unfortunately, knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge were not always one in the same.

  Arquat and I were walking down a secondary Engineering corridor towards one of the two Skip Drive nacelles. This was the corridor the Chief and I had been down the other day when I finally figured out that Arquat was using the lights to signal us. I could still see the plasma torch writing on the wall.

  “So, we have the tools and most of the components to get our drive back online, but we are missing a sufficient supply of yttrium for the superconductors,” I said over my comm link with Doctor Thompson and the Chief. They were meeting us at the port nacelle.

  “Thoughts as to where we might find some yttrium?” I asked the hologram.

  “We have two choices. Option one: we can attempt to rendezvous with an asteroid and mine it.”

  We turned the final corner and met up with Thompson and the Chief.

  “Option two?” I prompted.

  “We could steal it,” the ship’s AI said.

  The funny thing is… I think he preferred option two. What’s even more amazing is that the others agreed with him almost immediately.

  “Am I the only one who thinks mining for something on a nice and uninhabited asteroid is safer than sneaking in someplace with people and swiping something from under their noses?”

  “With all due respect, sir,” Chief answered. “Yttrium is typically formed by red giants. There aren’t a lot of those types of suns in this neck of the woods. That means there isn’t all that much Yttrium floating around in the solar system. On the other hand, it’s also produced by nuclear fission.”

  I finally understood. If we wanted Yttrium, we were going to have to make it ourselves or beg, borrow, or steal it. Since we didn’t have an old-style fission reactor, beg, borrow or steal from someone who did became our only viable option.

  An access panel to the nacelle was open. It was obvious from the carbon scoring that some type of fire had occurred within the nacelle.

  I pointed towards the panel.

  “What’s the story here?”

  The Chief wiped a finger across the black residue and smelled it briefly… rubbing his fingers together in the process.

  “As you can see, an overloaded plasma conduit exploded inside the pod itself. We’ve replaced the surge protector from what was available in the ship’s stores. I’m going to send Mikey… that’s our repair droid… inside to clean up this mess,” he showed me his fingers.

  I nodded. “Tell me about the superconductors?”

  Doctor Thompson flicked on a display that was built into the wall. It showed a schematic.

  “When the surge went through,” he said, “this junction and the surrounding area reached about nine hundred to a thousand degrees kelvin. As you know, the Skip Drive functions by rapidly generating an oscillating magnetic field and then using a Meissner effect magnetic expulsion within the superconductor to interact with fifth-dimensional space.

  “When these coils reached that temperature, they were well above the superconducting threshold. The magnetic fields shredded them. They are probably even now coasting along in five-dimensional space wondering where to go next.”

  It was a bit more of an answer than I wanted. The bottom line is we were not going to be harvesting the needed Yttrium from the damaged coils.

  ***

  It took us three more days to finish all the repairs we could. I spent some of that in the learning chair again. In point of fact, we all did.

  We cross-trained so that everybody could pinch hit for everybody else. That said, Tange became our Medical specialist and we took to calling her Doctor when she was in the Sickbay. Mel was our weapons and security specialist. Horse and I focused on Bridge systems. That left Thompson and the Chief in charge of Engineering.

  According to Arquat, the ship was in better shape than at any time in the last five or six centuries. All except for that one system we needed the most: our Skip Drive.

  Fortunately, I knew where we were going to acquire our Yttrium. Now if only I could get the locals to cooperate.

  The Queen listened to the charges of treason against the realm with stoic resolve. She had always known this day would come. She and her family would be put on a very public trial… the outcome, of course, would be predetermined by the largest of the corporations. They were the real power. Her concern was not for herself, but for her daughter and her mission. That mission was the last true hope for her people.

  Chapter 11: Will I fight for the Queen or the Slave?

  Our first clue something was seriously wrong was when we settled into orbit around Epidamnus a month and a half later. Both Epidamnus and his twin brother, Syracuse, were M-class moons orbiting the gas giant Menaechmus.

  While the twins were technically habitable worlds with abundant water oceans, a thick nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, and cold but tolerable temperatures… they were both subject to intense radiation from particles trapped in the gas giant’s magnetosphere.

  That radiation interacted on a daily basis with the abundant water on each of the moons to product vast quantities of deuterium oxide or heavy water. Heavy water was used in the same type of nuclear reactors that produce Yttrium.

  It was exceedingly valuable, especially when available in the concentrations found on both Epidamnus and Syracuse. A person could make a sizable fortune as a miner on the moons… so long as he wasn’t indentured to a corporation. Many a miner had spent two years or so hauling frozen D2O and retired to New Aussiland on Azul as a rich man.

  Heavy water and deuterium mining operations had been established on both moons. To protect the miners, indentured and free, from the lethal x-rays; shielded domes dotted the major population centers.

  Many of those domes had been shattered. Fires could be seen from orbit. Mashuta Industries battle cruisers orbited Epidamnus. There should have been roughly the same number of TransCorp ships as well, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  The entire crew was on the bridge. Mel was at her weapons console. Doctor Thompson was at sensors and Horse had the helm.

  “I’m seeing a lot of orbiting debris, as well as some unexploded ordnance,” Mel reported.

  “Confirmed,” Thompson said. “There are a number of large impact sites on the moon’s surface. They seem to be recent and metallic.”

  “Are we looking at a corporate war?” Horse asked, although we all knew the answer.

  “Why wouldn’t the Imperial fleet have put a stop to it?” Tange asked.

  Arquat shimmered into existence.

  “Radio chatter confirms a hostile takeover by Mashuta Industries,” the hologram said. “In addition, it would seem the hostilities were not limited to Epidamnus and Syracuse. There are heavily encrypted messages coming from Azul indicating a coup in progress.”

  I heard a sharp int
ake of breath from Tange.

  Before we could even begin to process the implications of what the AI had just shared with us, a klaxon sounded.

  “We are under attack,” Mel barked. “Two ships approaching from the port side. They are powering up their weapons.”

  “RAISE SHIELDS!”

  “On it,” the Master Gunny answered.

  “Horse, evasive maneuvers. Engineering, reactors to 100%. Divert power to weapons and shields.”

  I toggled my ship-to-ship comms.

  “Attention, approaching vessels. We are peaceful. Please stand down your weapons.”

  Their only answer was to launch a pair of hyper-velocity missiles in our direction. If I had been serving on the UAS Wolfbane or one of the other Wolf corps battlecruisers, four HVMs coming at us would have been cause for only mild concern. Such ships were designed to shrug off a lot more than that. I wasn’t sure what a ship like the Defiant could handle, but I wasn’t particularly interested in finding out.

  “Deploying counter-measures,” Mel announced.

  “Counter-measures ineffective,” Thompson reported a second or two later. “Impact in three, two, one…”

  WHOMMMP!

  The ship shook but remained otherwise intact.

  “Shield strength down five percent. Regenerating quickly. Thirty seconds to fully recovery.”

  I nodded at Horse by way of acknowledgement.

  “Tough little ship,” the Chief said with just a hint of pride.

  “Sixteen new launches,” Mel reported. “Apparently they each dumped their entire racks. If we survive, they will be fangless for a good five to ten minutes while they reload.”

  “Oh, we’ll survive,” I said. “Mel, give them a taste of our primary plasma turret. Wide beam. Let’s take out those HVMs.”

  Thirteen of the missiles were destroyed outright. One diverted into the planetoid’s atmosphere where it burned up. The other two impacted harmlessly on our shields.

  I was feeling much better about our little ship. It seemed the Founders built them tough. That was good because I was tired of being the only one shooting. The enemy was letting us know they cared in their own inimitable way. It seemed only fair to return the favor… in our inimitable way. I was fairly sure ours would hurt more and I wasn’t disappointed.

  “Mel, target the nearest one with the railgun. Try and take out their engines.”

  “I have a firing solution. Firing now.”

  There was a series of three deep popping sounds as the Defiant’s powerful kinetic energy weapon launched three, twenty-kilogram slugs at her target. Each was traveling at nearly 5% the speed of light.

  They cut through the Mashuta ship’s shields like a hot knife through butter. The rear third of the first ship was shredded.

  By Founder standards, our little ship’s weapons might have only been defensive, but they clearly outclassed what Azul could produce at this point.

  “The other ships are breaking orbit,” Mel said casually.

  Apparently, their captains had no stomach for a battle where they were outgunned.

  “As soon as they are out of sensor range set us down near the largest of those shattered domes,” I ordered.

  “Aye, Colonel,” Horse answered.

  He pressed a few buttons on his control panel so he could tie into Mel’s sensors. He would hear a soft beeping once the enemy was out of range. Horse stood up and approached my command chair.

  “There is no way we are going to be able to render aid to the tens of thousands of people down there. You know that don’t you?” He said softly.

  I nodded. I knew that all too well. The only solace I took was that most of the habitats had extensive subterranean tunnels that would provide protection from the harsh radiation. Hopefully that would keep the death toll down to those that had been killed when the domes were initially hit as well as those that had taken a lethal dose before they could get to safety.

  “First, we are going to document the damage, the cause, and the extent. I want there to be no question in anybody’s mind that Mashuta has committed genocide. Second, we are going to retrieve a supply of Yttrium so we can take these bastards down.”

  ***

  If anything, the damage on the ground in Dome 43 seemed worse than it had from orbit. Our advanced, Founder-class ship suits, provided by Arquat, protected us from the surface radiation but they could not protect us from the carnage we were seeing.

  Only the TransCorp domes had been targeted, but that still meant thousands of defenseless men and women had been forced to endure the enemy barrage. The dead were everywhere and completely indiscriminate. Whole families appeared to have perished as sections of the dome collapsed.

  My blood began to boil. While I had been a member of the Wolf Corps, no order to target civilians directly would ever have been accepted. Don’t get me wrong, collateral damage among civilians was all too common. It had been what drove me to the bottle, but never had I been asked to target non-combatants. I would likely have shot the person giving the order.

  We were inspecting and photographing an unexploded shell that had the words From Mashuta Industries with Love stenciled on it when I heard a loud metal-on-metal pinging sound. A moment later my left shoulder was on fire. I had been shot enough times in my life to know exactly what was going on.

  “Everybody down!” I yelled. “Horse, Mel, find whoever is shooting at us and ruin their day.”

  “3 o’clock,” Mel said calmly as she sighted with the scope on her rifle. “I make it four-hundred meters.”

  “Two more at 3:10 and 15,” Horse added.

  “Another just joined our friend at 3,” Mel said.

  I slapped an expanding bandage into the hole in my shoulder. I’m not a fan of pain, especially my own, and this most certainly hurt. That said it was a darn sight better than being dead. Had that sniper managed to hit me six inches over and it would have been lights out for Colonel Riker.

  Having stopped the bleeding, I pulled up my rifle and sighted in on the bad guy at 3:15.

  “I’ve got a bead on the guy to the right,” I said. Let’s take them down.”

  It took me two shots to nail my target. That was unusual for me, but in my defense, I was wounded. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

  Mel nailed her two targets without batting an eye. For the record, she was not wounded. Horse missed his target because the man had the good fortune to move behind a piece of crumpled dome just before the shooting began.

  I radioed the Defiant which had landed about a hundred meters southwest of our position in the ruined dome.

  “Chief, we have hostile contact. Keep the ship buttoned up and engage as needed.”

  “Understood, Colonel. Do you need assistance?”

  “Negative. We’re fine for the moment. Riker out.”

  Horse was scanning the far side of dome where we had just taken out some of the bad guys. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.

  Horse nodded. “If you’re thinking where there were four there are likely more… then yes, I’m thinking the same thing.”

  “Master Gunny, would you be kind enough to pop a few rounds in the general direction of our friend over there?”

  “It would be my greatest pleasure, Colonel.”

  Horse shook his head. “I can think of plenty of things more pleasurable, usually involving couples.”

  Mel turned to look at the Major and said in a deceptively sultry voice, “If you care to pursue that line of thinking, sir, I would be happy to comply… but it most certainly will involve a trip to the Sickbay and likely some emergency surgery. You let me know if you’re interested.”

  Horse laughed. “No, Master Gunny. I think I’m good.”

  “I suspected as much, sir,” she said almost sadly.

  Turning back to our friend down range, she began to fire carefully aimed kinetic rounds. They bounced off pieces of metal that had fallen from the ruined dome. One of the bullets must have ricocheted and
caused a piece of shrapnel to hit the Mashuta man because there was a sudden burst of swearing.

  “As I said, sir… greatest pleasure.”

  Horse and I split up. I headed to the left and he headed to the right. The idea was to encircle and capture our friend. I hoped that the Master Gunny didn’t get lucky again. I needed intel and this man represented my best chance of getting some.

  As I rounded a crushed civilian truck, I spotted the entrance tunnel our foes were using. It was shielded from direct forward view by various pieces of the fallen dome. I knew this was, at least, one of the entry points as two more soldiers popped into view as I was approaching my target. I took my anger out on both of them.

  Since kinetic rifles use miniature linear accelerators to fire their rounds, they are relatively quiet. The Master Gunny’s constantly ricocheting rounds, however, made a lot of noise. This meant my target didn’t hear his comrades fall as I took them out with extreme prejudice. He also didn’t hear Horse and I flank him from opposite sides. At least, not until Horse inadvertently kicked a piece of metal, making enough noise to wake the dead.

  Jong Kim reviewed the status reports. Things were proceeding better than expected. Years of careful planning were coming to fruition. The old order was ending and the age of Mashuta was finally being realized. The empire, under his guidance, would flourish in ways the Queen and her lackeys could never have imagined.

  It was perhaps best that she and her family would not survive the coming purge. There was no point in maintaining a rallying point for inevitable malcontents.

  Chapter 12: Fighting for the Slave

  Our bad guy heard Horse’s stumble and turned his rifle in the general direction of the noise as he sought to find a target. He was just beginning to draw a bead on the Major. I couldn’t have that… and to be honest I was still royally pissed about the civilian casualties, so I decided to unload a boatload of hurt on this unfortunate sap.