Harbinger

by Charles R Case

Caroline came back on the line, her voice filled with concern that had not been there before. “I’m sorry, ma’am. In the confusion, I failed to notice that Cora is in some kind of maintenance cycle. I think the ship is prioritizing her repair. That’s the only thing I can guess.”

  “How long will she be out?” Sara asked, becoming more and more convinced the objects were not benign.

  “Ma’am, I don’t know. It’s similar to when we first installed the core, but there is no reason the system should be rebooting. She just seems to be preoccupied.”

  “Is she in danger?” Grimms asked quickly, drawing a look from Sara.

  “Uh, no, sir. She’s just in a maintenance cycle,” Caroline said. “If I had to guess I would say she’s doing better than when we were in battle. Her heart rate is lower, and her cortisol levels have come way down.”

  Grimms gave Sara a chagrinned look, and she smiled slightly in reassurance, “I need you to wake her up. The battle may not be over and she’s more than half our defenses.”

  “I’ll do what I can, ma’am, but I’m not even sure what’s wrong at the moment.”

  Teicheck came on the line, “Ma’am, I think this is a defense mechanism. The core is still online and monitoring all systems, but Cora’s Aether is still flowing through the system. I don’t think there is too much to worry about,” he said, in a maddeningly calm voice.

  “I need you to do whatever you can to wake her up. The Vitas could attack at any moment, and we are sitting ducks with her out of the fight,” Sara said, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the command ring. “Run whatever tests you need too. Find out what happened, and fix it. We need her.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ll do what we can, but it may take a little while. The system we’re using is still experimental at best,” Caroline said.

  “Great,” Sara grumbled to herself, then said, “Let me know as soon as she comes out of it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sara looked over her shoulder and saw that Nyx was out as well, curled in Grimms’ chair where he had left her.

  Shit. The last thing we need is to not have Cora. We’re sitting ducks without her.

  “Grimms, what do you think?” she asked, leaning over the command ring to get a better view of the holo table.

  He stroked his white beard. “I think there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, if it’s an attack. The PDCs are out, the shield amplifiers are all blown ‘til we can get new fuses in them——which Chief Sabine is giving me a twenty-minute ETA on,” he said, checking his tablet. “I can have the troops set for battle, but if those projectiles are some kind of weapon, we don’t know what the effects will be.”

  Sara pursed her lips and reached up to where Alister perched on her shoulder, looking over the holo images with her, and scratched him on the chin.

  “What do you think?” she asked him quietly.

  Her familiar gave a growl and bared his teeth at the floating objects.

  “I concur,” she said, making her decision. “Hon, Send the last of our gauss rounds into the belly of that ship. We can’t afford to wait and see who regains power first.”

  “That will be it, ma’am. We won’t be able to recharge the cannons until the reactors are restarted,” Grimms cautioned her.

  She considered the consequences while Hon slowly found his firing solution, intentionally giving her time to think. After a moment, she nodded. “Good point, Commander. Hon, send one round at a time, so we don’t overdo it.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” he acknowledged, finishing his solution. “Firing.”

  A yellow line snapped out of the holo projection of their ship and streaked toward the alien ship at an incredible speed. A bloom of fire indicated a hit, but when the image cleared, the ship was still intact and spinning lazily.

  “What happened? Did we get a hit? The ship doesn’t look any more damaged than it already did.” Sara leaned in and squinted at the small projection.

  “Checking,” Mezner said. “It seems that one of the objects encircling the ship was in the flight path of the round, ma’am”

  Hon looked up from his console. “Ma’am, I accounted for the objects’ projected paths. It should have been a clean shot.”

  “Shit,” Sara growled.

  “Battlestations! Prepare for boarders,” Grimms announced ship-wide over his comm.

  The alarm began to wail as Mezner said, “I don’t understand. There are no life signs on the objects.”

  “There were none on the ship, either. We’re working on the theory that they are robots, not living beings. Hon, send two slugs, try and overwhelm them,” Sara said, gripping the command ring with white knuckles and waiting for the move she knew was coming.

  The remaining lights dimmed for a moment as two more shots leapt from the cannons.

  “Impact,” Hon announced in a bright voice then, when he saw the aftermath, replied in a more somber tone, “I’m sorry, ma’am. Both shots were intercepted.”

  “We have power surges in multiple objects. They are changing course, heading our way,” Mezner said with shock. “They will be here in less than two minutes.”

  “All personnel, prepare for boarders. Suit up in shield helmets and battle armor if able.” Sara smashed a fist onto the table. “Grimms, you have the con. I’m going to join the Marines.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” he said, a grim look on his face.

  Making sure her shield collar was in place, Sara swept from the bridge, a growing cloud of anger and crackling energy following after.

  “I almost feel bad for the invaders,” Hon said when the door slid shut behind the captain.

  “Don’t. They’re invading her home. They’ve brought this on themselves,” Grimms said, looking at the unconscious form of Nyx as she lay curled in his chair, her small, cream-colored body barely moving with each breath. “I just hope we survive her onslaught.”

  26

  A clanging sound rang through the deck. Then another. Soon, it sounded like a heavy rain on a tin roof, so many of the things were latching on to the hull. Sara sprinted toward the cargo bay, trying to get to her armor, but she was sure she was too late.

  “Alister, I’m going to need a shield that stays close, preferably right on top of me; these corridors are close, and I don’t want to be blocking the Marines’ shots with my shield.”

  The small, black cat was hunkered down on her shoulder, the gripping pads of his battlesuit holding tight. He sent her a ‘so-so’ feeling, letting her know that he would do his best, but that it wouldn’t be as form-fitting as her armor. She got a mental picture of a tight oval shield and nodded.

  “It’ll have to do. Maybe we won’t need it.”

  Alister growled low, and she gave a chuckle. “Yeah, you’re right. We’re going to need it.”

  She was grateful she had taken the time to get Alister and Nyx in their battlesuits while they were waiting for the repairs. And she was doubly happy they had developed the shield helmets for the small animals; it was one less thing she needed to worry about.

  “Ma’am, the commander said you were coming to join us. We are on deck two, just outside the main airlock. It looks like the invaders are going to come in through there,” Baxter said. His voice was calm, but she could tell he was running.

  Shit, that’s on the opposite side of the ship. I really am going to have to forgo my armor. She let out a huff. “Copy that, Sergeant. I’m on my way. ETA, two minutes.”

  She turned and took a flight of stairs down one level and began running in the opposite direction she had been traveling in. Then the ship shook, and there was a ripping sound that seemed to come from everywhere. Her hair whipped in the sudden wind when the blast door in front of her slammed shut, cutting her off from the sudden decompression. She ran into the steel door, stopping herself with both hands.

  “Baxter, report!”

  “They breached the airlock. I’m still en route, I’ll be there in a second,” he said, now slightly out of breath as he pushed himself
harder.

  She could feel the panic bleeding off of him. His men were engaging an enemy, and he was not there in time.

  “Be careful, love,” she said on a private channel.

  “I always am,” he lied.

  There was a panic-filled moment when she realized she couldn’t get to him. If there was a breach, she and everyone else would be cut off until the ship could be depressurized and the blast doors reopened, and that could take several minutes.

  Several minutes was a lifetime in the middle of a battle.

  She punched the heavy metal door in frustration, and pain shot up her arm. She growled at her inability to get across her own ship.

  I wish I could fly there, she thought. She cocked her head in consideration. “I’m coming in behind them. Give me one minute, and for fuck’s sake, keep me updated!” she shouted into her comm as she bounded up the stairs she had just descended, and headed for the cargo bay once again.

  She felt like she was taking forever as she ran as hard as she could through the corridors, bathed in the otherworldly red hue of the battlestations alert. She passed crewmembers and checked to see that they all had their shield collars on, and that they were armed. Many threw her salutes as she passed, but just as many were far too busy and nervous to even notice their captain passing at a full sprint.

  By the time she reached the cargo bay doors, the corridors has started the process of decompressing. When the doors slid open, her shield collar activated, covering her head and sealing the battlesuit to provide a breathable atmosphere.

  She glanced at her shoulder to make sure Alister’s new collar had activated along with hers. He gave her a slight nod as they burst through the doors and into the empty cargo bay. She briefly considered taking the two minutes to don her armor, but decided she couldn’t leave her men to fight this unknown enemy alone. Instead, she picked up speed as she sprinted for the plasma shield barrier between her and open space.

  She leapt the last few meters, flattening out like a superhero as she plunged through the buzzing field. The sudden silence of open space was unnerving, but nothing she hadn’t encountered many times before.

  She turned around with a complicated movement she had learned while doing zero-g maneuvers in the academy, and could see the Raven falling away from her. The battle damage was far worse when viewed from the outside; large chunks of the hull had been split open where the armor had been burned or stripped away, and sparks and gases poured from the aft section, where a direct hit had, luckily, only ruptured the fuel tanks for the fusion reactors, and not the reactors themselves.

  God, this is going to take forever to fix. We might even have to decommission the girl, she thought darkly before turning her attention to the problem at hand.

  She was on the opposite side of the ship as the attackers and their ship, but the slow revolution of the dead Raven was bringing the alien ship into view. Even in the blackness of space, she could see the light of the system’s sun glinting off the thousands of small, metal objects that were streaming toward her.

  Her jaw set, and a calmness came over her at the thought of the destruction she was about to rain down on these bastards.

  Using a shield spell from Alister, she pushed the two of them around the Raven and into a direct path of the objects.

  When the pair came over the ship’s horizon, Sara could see the oblong objects slotting open. At first she thought they were coming apart, but she soon realized the humanoid robots had been folded down into a compact shape, but were opening up spread-eagle when they moved within a couple hundred meters of the Raven‘s hull, preparing to hit the surface and grab hold, digging into the hardened armor plating.

  She brought her and Alister to a stop and assessed the situation. There was a long stream of the compact robots flowing toward the Raven, stretching out for over a kilometer from the Vitas ship. She did a quick estimate and guessed that there were over five hundred of them, though only a fraction of that number had already made it to the ship.

  Still, she knew her people would be overrun if they had to fight all of them.

  I need to thin the ranks before they can get here, she realized, and she requested a spellform from Alister. The three dimensional spellform appeared in her mind, and she fed it Aether without even checking to see if it was correct.

  Alister was so much better at spellforms than she ever had been that checking his work would be like trying to find the error in a mathematician’s calculation when she only knew basic algebra.

  A shield formed above her, and she glanced up at it as it grew thicker. It was constructed like a cone, with the tip blunted. It was five meters wide at the base and came to a rounded point that was about one meter across. It reminded her of a pellet from the air rifle they had had when they were kids.

  The robot army had not seemed to notice her floating above their target, but Sara was sure that would change in just a moment.

  She sent a mental command to Alister, and he began to morph the spellform as she continued to feed it Aether. With surprising speed, the construct shot away from them and headed directly for the loose line of robots. She had aimed for the section right behind where they were unfolding and attaching to the ship, hoping that in their compacted forms, they would have less maneuverability.

  The shield slammed into the first bot, and Sara felt a tug on her Aether well, as if it was taking an enormous amount of power to keep the shield intact. The first bot was broken open, and sparks jumped from its damaged parts as it flew off into the blackness of space.

  Sara smiled. It was working.

  Then the second and third bot hit the shield, and she grunted at the construction’s sudden loss of Aether. They were thrown free just as the first had been, but the cost on her power was astounding.

  Are they burning through my shield? That shouldn’t happen, unless they’re way heavier than they look, she thought, but she dismissed that idea when she saw that the shield itself was not taking much damage.

  On every impact, it was flaring, but not so much that it was changing color. But something was draining her Aether away when her spell touched the bots. This was confirmed when the shield blasted into four bots at once, and she nearly passed out from the exertion. The bots were somehow siphoning off the Aether.

  There is no way I can stop them all, if it takes this much power to hit them, she thought.

  When the next impact took its toll, she let the spellform drop. The golden pellet dissolved into nothingness before another bot could hit it.

  She had blasted eight of the bastards, and it had taken almost half her Aether to do it. So that’s not the way to win this battle…

  She looked around for something to throw with a spellform, thinking that if there was something hitting the bots that was not Aether-based, maybe she could mitigate the drain, but she couldn’t find anything within grabbing distance. Most of the debris from their own ship was small and had traveled too far away when it was blasted off, and she didn’t want to try and grab anything from the Vitas ship, if it was just going to drain her like the bots did.

  With frustration, she decided she needed to get back inside the Raven and help her men. Even if they ended up fighting all five hundred bots, in a stand-up fight, she thought she could take that many enemies.

  At least she hoped so.

  She powered a new spell, and she and Alister were pushed to the airlock. She could see bots climbing in like four-legged spiders, but some of them were being blasted back out of the hole in sprays of rifle fire.

  “Baxter, what’s the sit rep?” she asked, trying to figure out the best way to get into the ship.

  “We’ve lost twelve people, but the tide seems to be slowing,” he said, and Sara could hear him breathing hard.

  “That’s only going to last for a few seconds. I took out the next eight in line, but I can’t keep it up. I need to get in there,” she said, thinking of what she could do to get past the constant spray of metal slugs.

  A spellform a
ppeared in her head, and she took a quick look at it. She rolled her eyes at her own stupidity.

  Alister was showing her the spellform that Cora had used to teleport, back on Earth. Sara had forgotten that Nyx showed him and Silva how to do it.

  “I’m coming in, Baxter. Have the men fall back from the airlock opening,” she ordered, and prepared herself.

  “We’re clear, but there are several of those things climbing through,” he responded.

  “That’s fine. They won’t be there for long,” she said to him, then added, “I hope,” under her breath.

  Then she powered the form in her mind.

  27

  “I‘m getting power signatures throughout the alien vessel, Commander,” Mezner reported, her voice hoarse from stress.

  Grimms gritted his teeth. The last thing we need is for that asshole to come back online while we’re sitting dead in the water. “Is it repairing itself, or just rebooting some system?”

  The ensign took a minute to reply. “It looks like they have a repair system comparable to the Raven, sir.”

  “Shit. How are our repairs coming?” he asked, staring down at the holo image of the Vitas ship slowly spinning.

  “Unknown, sir. With Cora down, we can only estimate, but I would say we’re more than an hour from being up,” Mezner said, then leaned in to her console. “Sir! The enemy is sending out a signal. It looks like a communication, but it’s not any coding I recognize.”

  “It’s broadcasting? Give me a scan of the system, use whatever power you need. We need to see if there is another one of these ships close enough to get that communication,” Grimms said, his stomach dropping at the thought of another of these ships coming after them.

  “Aye, sir. Scanning now,” she said, getting to work.

  “Sir, I’m getting an anomaly several thousand kilometers behind the Vitas ship. It looks like a gravity well is forming,” Hon reported, slightly panicked.

  “A gravity well? Like another ship?” Grimms asked for clarification.

  “No, sir. More like a large asteroid, but it’s growing in intensity,” Hon said, his eyes wide. “Oh, shit.”