Chaos Vector

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “Override that shit,” she ordered.

  “On it,” Conway called back. Both hands danced over her console.

  “Maybe we should let the ship evade?” Liao said.

  “We are evading, but we aren’t leaving. Those things don’t want visitors, and I’d bet my life they’ll try to destroy the gate behind us. I’m not giving them the chance,” Sanda said.

  “Let the commander command,” Conway said, and though her gaze never shifted from her work, the tone she used was its own kind of weapon. Liao slumped, her face ghostly pale.

  The first volley hit.

  Sanda clenched her jaw as the ship rocked, thrusters fighting against the momentum imparted by the impact. Memories of pain enfolded her, pushed to the surface. The scream of metal and polymers shredding, of her people being torn apart, as an Icarion railgun—No. Focus.

  Her fingers slicked the display with sweat as she tapped the button for a hull report, the viewscreen wicking away the moisture a second after the smears appeared. She prayed Prime built their ships as well as their screens.

  A diagram of the ship flashed into the upper left of the forward screen, freckled with red but holding. Whatever those things were, they weren’t capable of a full bombardment. Death by a thousand paper cuts could take the Thorn down all the same.

  Crimson squares that represented the shield pieces grouped and swooped across the viewscreen, closing in on the Thorn in a bloody clot.

  “They’re swarming,” Liao said, her voice tinged with awe.

  “Spray laser fire,” Sanda ordered.

  Conway didn’t hesitate, though Demas flinched. The Thorn was a Point ship, meant to punch holes with precision, not spread fire in waves, and so the sheet-lasers would be an inordinate draw on their engines, slowing their maneuverability.

  A risk, but a calculated one. If they kept taking fire, there wouldn’t be much of a ship left to maneuver.

  The battle played out on the viewscreen, lines and geometries zipping back and forth, current positions of all objects best guesses extrapolated from mass and velocities.

  “Threat twenty percent down,” Conway announced. Though Sanda could read the numbers for herself, hearing them out loud sent a shock wave of dread through her body.

  Those guns were their best bet at taking down the brunt of the force. Twenty percent was nothing, and the weapons were closing, their energy weapons chipping away at the Thorn.

  “Helmets,” she ordered, and flicked the button on her console.

  Vacuum-ready helmets descended from panels in the ceiling on telescoping poles above every station. Sanda yanked hers down and pulled it over her head, running her thumb along the neck gasket to seal it to the Prime jumpsuit. Without a lifepack attached, the recyclers would give out in hours, but at least she wouldn’t lose pressure immediately if the weapons punched a hole in the command deck. Prime had trained her to get ahead of catastrophe, and despite her life events thus far, Sanda didn’t forget her training.

  “Switch to gun hail,” she ordered the second Conway’s name went live in her HUD.

  “Firing,” Conway said, punching the ship’s reverse targeting system into life. The shield-weapons may have them painted in targeting lasers stem to stern, but that gave her weapons a clear bead to fire back on.

  A chunk of enemy dots on the screen peeled off, shattering under the hail of projectiles. Sanda took advantage of the returned engine power and ordered the ship to sling around, giving the advancing force a smaller target to hit in their well-shielded backside.

  “If you let them shoot our engines and they breach containment, you’re giving them a bomb,” Demas hissed.

  “The engines are better shielded than the deck.”

  “Nothing will be shielded if—”

  “Shut the fuck up, Demas. Knuth, wind down nonessentials, prepare for EMP. Everyone, power off wristpads.”

  Silence on the comms. Then, chipper as anything, “On it, Commander.”

  “There’s nothing in this system,” Demas said. “If you fire that EMP while our engines are hot, then we’re dead in the water.”

  “Demas,” Conway said, “the commander said to shuck the fuck up.”

  “Continue fire,” Sanda said. “Give them so much to track they can’t see the EMP charging.”

  “You cannot fire that EMP!”

  “Cutting Demas from comms,” Sanda said.

  “What—” His voice dissolved in a crackle as she swiped him out of the network.

  “Peaceful,” Nox said.

  “Essential communications only,” Sanda said. An emoji middle finger popped up in her text display. Despite herself, she grinned.

  “Knuth, report.”

  “Winding down while looking feisty’s not easy, but we’re getting there. Ten minutes.”

  According to the predictions on Sanda’s monitor, the berserkers would have them swarmed in seven minutes. She said nothing, because Knuth had access to the same data, and saying anything would add fractions of seconds they didn’t have.

  “Give them everything except the railguns and the EMP, Conway. Lasers, projectiles. All of it.”

  “Yes, sir.” If there was a little too much enthusiasm in her voice, Sanda ignored it.

  She clutched the arm of her chair in one hand as the Thorn shuddered and jerked, pulled back and forth in a tug-of-war of Newton’s laws as the stabilizers struggled in vain to keep her stable against the contrasting velocity of their own gunfire and the impact of the weapons. The graphical representation of the Thorn’s damage lit up like a supernova.

  Six minutes until the berserkers would be so close they couldn’t even pretend to dodge. She needed them close for the EMP to take them all down, but the power-up was taking too long. They were going to get shredded.

  Sanda’s view went white and terror leapt into her throat. Her blood pooled into her legs. She clenched her core as hard as she could, flexed her thighs, fought like hell against the g’s pulling her back and sideways so hard and fast even the inertial dampers couldn’t compensate. Or maybe Knuth had already taken those offline. Her hearing fuzzed, then slammed back along with her vision.

  There was a dinner-plate-sized hole in her ship. The weapon had cut a neat through-and-through above the corner of the forward viewscreen. Sparks crackled in the hole. Sanda glanced instinctively to the viewscreen to see a readout of the damage, but the shot had taken out some essential system and the screen was half black, the only side online showing the advancing tide of enemy ships. All loose debris—styluses, bits of paper, unstowed tablets—flew into the black.

  That hole would kill them. Sanda’s ship. Sanda’s responsibility. She grabbed the patch kit strapped to the side of her chair and undid her harness in one fluid, well-practiced motion and dug her heels into the seat to kick off.

  Demas had moved first. He had the patch kit from his seat crammed under one arm and with the other he pushed her down, back into the seat, and pulled her harness hastily across her chest. She flicked her gaze to the comms list to pull him back up, but he swiveled, pushed off of her toward the gaping hole in the Thorn. The suction drew him to the wall faster than any kick-off, and he slammed against the twisted metal, barely missing losing an arm out the hole.

  “Not your job,” she said over comms, then remembered she’d taken away his ability to respond.

  He had the kit open, but she knew full well there wasn’t a patch in the kit big enough to cover that hole alone. With a curse, she tossed him the other kit end over end. He snatched it before it could get ripped outside, and popped it open. Loose supplies were sucked out the hole, but he wasn’t after those. He slammed the kit box against the sucking wound. The metal buckled on contact, but held. He could apply the patches over the edges.

  One minute until full EMP. The ship bucked as the weapons drew closer, more and more fire breaking through Conway’s suppressive efforts, blowing holes small and large all across her length even as Sanda slewed around, doing everything she could to make
them a smaller target.

  “Knuth,” she said, “kill it.”

  “Fuck,” he said, but the engines went down, cut off before they could spool out properly, all the tension in her controls bleeding away into nothing. Life support cut out. Comms dropped. Warning lights flared across the deck, alarms screamed or metal screamed or people or all of the above as the weapons closed, cocooned the Thorn as they had whatever they’d been hiding. Whatever was at the heart of those coordinates.

  Sanda deployed the EMP.

  A concussive whump spread out from the heart of the ship. The viewscreen on her helmet fuzzed, the haptic feedback in her gloves went dead. Silence, deep and deadly, spread throughout the deck until all Sanda could hear, the only thing that she knew to be real, was the thundering of her heart.

  The helmet was dead. It hadn’t been powered down. She ripped the helmet off and gasped in the too-cold air of the deck, atmo thinned by its struggle toward equilibrium with the vacuum on the other side of the ship’s wound. She pressed her helmet into her lap and gripped it tight with one arm. The others, one by one, peeled off their helmets.

  Conway was first to speak. “Did we get them?”

  Sanda glared at the blank and broken viewscreen, as if it had answers. Everything pulling power when the EMP went off was fried, and that meant all their targeting systems and most of their cameras. She flinched as something metallic pinged against the ship, fearing a projectile, but the sound was far too gentle for that.

  Another ping, and another. She let out a shaky breath. The weapons weren’t firing. They were bumping into the Thorn from their conserved momentum.

  “Knuth,” Sanda said, surprised by the steadiness in her voice, “can we get a visual?”

  “I, uh, I can’t bring the engines online yet, but we have the subgenerator for the crossing. I killed the side panels right before.”

  He unbuckled and kicked off, thrusting himself like a spear down the long hallway to the engine room. The generator would have to be brought online by hand.

  “If we’re not dead, they are,” Nox said, which seemed clear-enough logic, but Sanda wasn’t willing to bet anything on that assumption.

  She caught herself breathing shallowly, sipping at the air, and forced herself to take normal breaths. Either life support would come back on, or it wouldn’t. Making herself light-headed in the meantime wasn’t going to help.

  From the back of the ship came the soft purr of the generator coming online. She closed her eyes briefly, focused on feeling the subtle vibration of it kicking into life through the contact of her chair. They had power. They’d have life support.

  The left viewscreen fizzled online, first a haze of meaningless grey as Knuth cycled through cameras until he found one that could be raised from the dead. At first, Sanda couldn’t tell the difference between the empty grey and the live feed. Not until she noticed a metallic glint, and black veining in the cracks between the shield-weapons.

  “We’re surrounded,” Conway said, fingers itching toward her dead weapon controls.

  “By corpses,” Sanda said slowly, running what few scans were still available to her. “No heat, no signaling of any kind. They’re offline.”

  Arden laughed, nervously. Sanda was afraid that if she joined them, she’d never stop.

  “We—” The subconscious part of her mind that was always keeping track of her crew noticed: Demas hadn’t taken his helmet off. His dead helmet.

  Sanda tossed her helmet aside and ripped off her harness, then kicked herself toward him. She collided palms-out with the bulkhead beside him, ignoring the droplets of sticky red that caught on her jumpsuit and were, as was the way with Prime materials, wicked away. Prime never let the blood stain.

  “Demas!” She grabbed his helmet and yanked.

  Sweaty black hair stuck up, his face drawn, but his eyes were open, alert. His gaze locked onto hers and he grimaced, glancing along his body to his thigh, gripped in both hands, his jaw locked as he strained with everything he had to keep the flow in check.

  “Just a graze,” he hissed between his teeth.

  Sanda grabbed what was left of the patch kit—not ideal for human flesh, but not useless—and pushed his hand away. The graze ran deep, but it was still a graze, and didn’t wander near any of his arteries.

  “You lucky fuck.” She peeled the patch open and pressed it against his thigh. It would keep him mostly together until they brought a proper medical kit over.

  “Not feeling very lucky.”

  “What were you thinking? You should have let me do it. I don’t have as much skin to hit.”

  He snorted, but was smiling through a grimace of pain. “Conway was right. You needed to focus on commanding, and I had the hands free to make the fix.”

  Huh, maybe Demas wasn’t such a locked-down asshole after all.

  “Commander,” Knuth said, “I’ve put a little juice in the engines. Happy to report I got Grippy offline before the EMP.”

  “Thanks, Knuth. Conway, nose us through. Demas, can you get yourself to the medibay?”

  “I’ll patch myself up like a good kid after we see what that sphere was hiding.”

  She rolled her eyes but didn’t protest. “Your funeral.”

  Conway took control of the ship’s navigation, and though she nudged it slower than Sanda felt possible, the Thorn nosed “up,” if such a thing had meaning in space, toward a thinness in the weapons that surrounded them. Though many of the weapons were chewed up by the Thorn’s fire, most were still whole, and Sanda could see no mechanism by which they had worked. They were smooth, slightly convex pieces of what had been the sphere they first sighted.

  Everyone craned to see the side viewscreens, squinting as if doing so would clear up the graininess of the few cameras left standing. Sanda realized, in the second before they broke through, that she was holding her breath.

  At first, blackness. Nothing but the inclement void that stretched between all stars. Then, impossibly, light. Not from the gate or the weapons or even the Thorn, but a smudge of glow. The same glow they’d seen emitting from the weapons the moment before they struck.

  In the center of the light, cradled in its heart, silver metal. Titanium white, pure and gleaming, though this was a material she had never seen before. A cloud of metal, maybe, a cluster of brightness and solidity that began to take shape as she stared, eyes adjusting, finding differences from one bright spot to another.

  It reminded her of a neuron map, an image of a mind deep in thought, electronic impulses surging along metallic connections, but it was shaped like no mind she’d ever seen. It was long, lean, and three times larger than the Thorn, though scale was a difficult thing to determine without reference.

  “It’s a ship,” she said aloud, and in speaking the words knew them to be true.

  CHAPTER 56

  PRIME STANDARD YEAR 3543

  THERE’S A PROTOCOL FOR THIS

  The Thorn limped toward the unknown ship. Silence had descended upon the deck, though not a true silence. While on the surface Sanda and her crew bent all their efforts to bringing the Thorn’s systems back online in a slow and deliberate manner that would not exacerbate any failures further, they limped, when they should not.

  A ship as damaged as the Thorn had no business moving, but the ship—that other ship—was a lodestone pulling them forward. At full power, it would have taken the Thorn a day’s flight to reach it. Now, it’d been closer to two. But they could no more sit patiently and repair themselves than they could cut their own arms off for a good time. Sleep had been abandoned. Food and water a grudging necessity. Sanda licked dried lips as they finally crossed into docking range.

  “Is it hailing?” Sanda asked to cut the silence. She could see as well as Conway and Knuth that nothing came from the ship.

  “No signals,” Conway said. “Though the radiant heat signature puts it somewhere around 15C.”

  “Positively toasty,” Sanda said.

  She brought up a scan of the s
hip, ordering what remained of the Thorn’s external sensors to pan over it, seeking some centralized source of power. There should be a concentration of heat near that power, or an obvious heat sink or radiation system keeping the ship’s heat circulating and bleeding off so that the whole thing wouldn’t overheat in a heat blanket of its own making.

  Nothing. The ship’s radiation signature was perfectly even from tip to tip.

  “Well, there’s no one home,” she said. She had absolutely no idea what they were dealing with. The lack of hot spots the likes of which you’d see on a ship like the Thorn, denoting a concentration of biological life, could only be interpreted on face value here. There was a lack of hot spots. End of supposition. She wondered why she thought of life in terms of the biological.

  “We are closing,” Conway said, taking the place of the ship’s AI voice—one of the many systems knocked offline by the EMP. Sanda’s poor ship would take a long while to get back on its feet. She glanced down at her leg and thought maybe she could think of a better metaphor.

  “Within the envelope of the shielding system,” Sanda said. Then, after a pause, “No further threat detected. If the ship has weapons, they’re not online or they’re so fancy the Thorn can’t pick them up.”

  “So what,” Nox said. “We saunter on up and say howdy?”

  There was a protocol for this. Never used, barely remembered. She’d taken tests on first-contact systems along with all the other fleeties, and though the information was old and she’d only paid half attention to it because, honestly, nobody thought they’d be using it, Sanda had never forgotten a protocol in her life.

  If this were a fleet operation, her orders would be to stay put, keep eyes on the unidentified object, call her superiors and not, under any circumstances, attempt communication until directed to by the Keepers of Prime. More than likely, if she made that call, Anford would tell her to haul ass out of there and then send a whole fleet, accompanied by GC and most likely Okonkwo and the other members of the High Protectorate.

  That was what was supposed to happen.