Rika Unleashed
Page 22
“Holy shit,” Shoshin whispered. “And it worked?”
“Yeah,” Gemma nodded. “We got them tucked away again, but it wasn’t easy. The other time was in the Transcend. They didn’t manage to stuff them back in, so now there’s an interdicted region of space where the Exdali are expanding…just feeding on everything. It’s growing slowly, but—”
“Stars, I really don’t want to think of that right now,” Rika said. “I mean…really, really don’t.”
“So why are you suggesting subjecting the rest of your fleet to them, Colonel?” Gemma asked.
“The Asora was trashed, and we blew our missile load on the Torrent of Fire,” Rika explained. “We’re flinging everything we have at those rocks that are headed to the Falcon. But if we could get a half-dozen relativistic missiles, the problem is solved.”
“And I take it they’re in short supply?” Kor asked.
“Yeah, the Event Horizon doesn’t have a single one aboard, and neither does the Torrent of Fire. These two ships haven’t seen resupply in months, and before that, they were stripped down for the fleet that hit Albany.”
“Holy shit,” Kor exclaimed, his eyes lighting up. “You want to get our fleet to send a few RMs into the dark layer, and then have them come out and take out the rocks.”
Rika nodded. “Precisely.”
“But they’re still, what…thirty AU out?” Gemma asked. “That’s four and a half hours at the speed of light. How will you message them?”
Rika gestured at the case Kor held. “With that. I can get them the message in seconds, they can get the missiles into the DL, and five minutes later, kaboom.”
“There’s just one problem,” Kor said meekly and lifted the case to reveal a hole three quarters of the way down. “Your ace in the hole took a hit.”
“Damn,” Gemma muttered. “The control systems are shot.”
“It’s useless without the control system,” Gemma said, her eyes narrowing. “What are you trying to do with it?”
Rika tapped her head. “I have control systems in here, just no paired atoms.”
“Holy crap,” the ISF lieutenant said as she rose. “Let me give you a hand, Kor.”
* * * * *
“I just got a QC relay from Khardine,” Chief Ona said, twisting in her seat as she turned to look at Heather. “It has Rika’s signature, which is odd, because it’s tagged as coming over Colonel Borden’s blade.”
“What’s the message, Chief?” Heather asked, finding the provenance to be strange as well, but wanting the meat of the matter.
“There’s a big mess of data—I think she burned out the blade sending this much at once. OK. She left some bits for Khardine to fill in, and they’re sending it now.”
As Ona began to assemble the data, Heather’s mouth dropped open—more from the newfound knowledge of the existence of living creatures in the dark layer than the fact that the Niets were pulling an asshole move like blowing up a station in retaliation for effectively losing a system.
Just then, Potter rushed onto the bridge in her new AI frame.
“I just pulled the updates and stumbled my way up here,” she said with a rueful expression on her new body’s alabaster face.
Heather gave Potter a quick smile. “And here you thought you’d have a quiet day to get used to a body.”
“Somehow I feel like I triggered this.” Potter’s tone was exceedingly morose, and she stopped herself. “Damn, emoting with a body is weird. Going to take some getting used to.”
“Worry about that later,” Heather replied, turning back to the holotank. “So Rika sent us this burst. In twenty-four minutes, those rocks will hit the station. She wants us to use the dark layer tunnel—provided it’s not swarming with those things—and send in missiles to swat those rocks.
“Right, so we need to take RMs,” Potter said.
“ ‘Take’?” Heather latched onto the word. “Don’t you mean ‘send’?”
Potter shook her head. “I’ve run the numbers and sent them by Piper, and he agrees with my findings. Ships have maneuvering grav drives; they can push off dark matter in any direction. RMs only have fusion and AP engines, which means they can’t maneuver in the dark layer.”
“Fuck,” Heather swore. “Of course. Someone has to go in there with the RMs.”
Potter shook her head vehemently. “Not ‘someone’. Me. It needs to be an AI, and I’m the one that can get there fastest. Launch the RMs, put them in cluster off the bow. I’ll grab them with a pinnace’s grav field and do what’s needed.”
Heather was about to object, but Potter had already run off the bridge.
Heather put a hand to her forehead, doing her best not to groan. Then she looked at Chief Garth, who was sitting open-mouthed, staring after Potter.
“You got cotton between your ears, Garth? Get the RMs in the tubes, yesterday, we only have twenty-four minutes till the asteroids hit that station.”
* * * * *
Potter wasn’t sure if it was the lack of adjustment to the physical body she was using—which seemed more ‘real’ to her than she thought it would—or just the gravity of what she was about to attempt, but she was quivering slightly as she slid into the pilot’s seat.
“Damn you Intrepid people and your belief in hyper-realism,” she muttered and sat back in the seat, pulling the harness down and then gripping the armrests.
The pinnace was already warmed up and spinning on the cradle to face the open bay doors as she reached out into the navigation systems.
While the idea of flying the ship using the consoles was interesting, she wasn’t about to try that for the first time on such an important mission. Instead, she closed her eyes and reduced her awareness of her body to the bare minimum, shifting her ‘senses’ to the ship’s sensors and engines.
The pinnace was her body, and she was speed.
The flight status showed green, and she hit the command for the rails to accelerate the ship out of the bay.
Potter banked the pinnace around the Fury Lance, boosting to meet the RMs that were holding steady in front of the massive vessel.
The pinnace was on the larger side, just under a hundred meters in length, and thirty wide—fifty with the atmospheric fins extended. She supposed that when the mothership was four kilometers long, a hundred-meter craft was a pinnace in comparison.
She slowed as she came over the ten RMs and extended her ship’s grav field, pulling them in close to the hull, hoping that the positive graviton field wouldn’t be enough to attract the Exdali once she transitioned.
She unfolded the data before transitioning; if she’d been fully connected to her physical body, her jaw would have dropped.
Shit! They know how to control the Exdali!
The message came with a strong admonition to only use the specific graviton waveforms to repulse the Exdali, not to attract. If they were to get out, it would take a whole fleet running the repulsion patterns to push the things back into the dark layer.
Not like I’d ever want to attract those things.
Potter checked over the ship’s status one last time and transitioned into the dark layer. Once the stars had disappeared, she checked that the RMs were still safely tucked against the belly of the pinnace, and activated the repulsion patterns in the grav systems.
“OK,” she muttered aloud, having momentarily forgotten she had a body. “Now I just need to worry about what I used to fear in the dark layer: running into invisible stationary dark matter.”
THE FIND
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: The Moon, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Borden leant out around a corner and fired on the first thing he saw, which turned out to be the back of a Nietzschean soldier who was fleeing down the large tunnel deep within The Moon.
Damn, bad form, that.
He signaled for Daphne to advance while he covered the dark shaft. Once she’d taken up a position behind a support column, Kali and Kev moved up to another. Borden followed, and the team leapfrogged their way down the passage, inexorably closing on their target.
Which he hoped was what they thought it would be.
After securing and disabling the base’s railguns, he and Gemma’s team had sat tight, waiting for the pinnace to come back and get them—until Saris had relayed the scan data that showed a nuclear blast, followed by an antimatter one.
He wasn’t going to count Gemma and the mechs out, but it meant that he and the Marines on The Moon were on their own. Rel had pored through the databases, finding that the base had passed through a lot of hands over the centuries, and the Niets only used the upper few levels.
It seemed that, once, Iberia had been an important and wealthy system, and this had been one of its primary military outposts—which was nothing more than intellectual stimulation, until Rel had found mention of something called a Starcrusher deep within the bowels of the base.
And so they left the command center—after blowing the control systems for the railguns—and had been fighting their way through the Nietzschean installation on The Moon ever since.
They’d long ago expended all their ammunition, scavenged for new weapons, and run some of those through all the rounds they could find. They were now down to the rifles they’d pulled off the most recent group of Niets they’d killed.
Each of the Marines had half a dozen weapons hanging from their shoulders and jammed into mounts on their backs, just in case they found magazines that fit one or another.
If one thing had become clear, it was that Iberia was the dumping ground for leftovers no one else wanted.
The same was true for the soldiers they’d encountered.
While Borden had to give credit where credit was due, in that they’d encountered a few squads who had stood their ground, just as many had run off when the four Marines arrived, pouring weapons fire into their foes and executing clean, well-orchestrated tactics.
While he appreciated the mechs’ way of fighting—one where they simply brought overwhelming force to bear in every situation—the ISF Marines had a long history of careful, yet effective tactics borne of their roots in the Terran Space Force’s Marines.
Borden himself had trained in the Congo on Earth, sweating out his days in boot under an unrelenting sun, learning how to make the most of every situation, especially when you were dealt a shitty hand.
Which seemed to be the rule, not the exception when serving as a Marine.
Their current situation was a prime example: nanoclouds depleted, armor hot and scored and incapable of stealth, troops scavenging for weapons and moving toward a destination that may or may not contain what they hoped it did.
‘Join a colony mission’, Borden thought with a laugh. ‘Leave all the shit behind’.
He liked to joke that serving in the ISF was the last thing he’d hoped to do after getting a berth on the GSS Intrepid, but if someone had asked him to be honest, he would have told them that he loved it.
At first he’d worried that his current assignment with the Marauders would see he and his team lost in the ass-end of space—which was pretty much their current situation—but he had to admit that he was rather enjoying galivanting across space with the mechs.
On top of that, the Nietzscheans were a foul people, whose ‘winner take all’ mentality had suffused every aspect of their society. The problem was, their society didn’t aid that many in becoming winners.
A part of him felt a modicum of guilt for mowing down so many of the poor saps that had been sent to this outpost, but if they picked up a rifle and aimed it at him, there was no debate. When push came to shove, that was the only rule that mattered in war—after having your team’s back, of course.
Kali chuckled as she eased around a support beam and nodded that the coast was clear.
Borden cycled his vision and sighed.
Daphne pulled the satchel off her shoulder and tossed it across the tunnel to Kev.
As he advanced to the rear, a hail of bullets flew through the air, nearly striking the Marine before he reached the next column. Borden signaled Kali to hold her position at the fore, while he and Daphne laid down suppressive fire for Kev.
Rounds streaked out from behind the boring machine, striking one of the burn sticks and knocking it into a wall. But the other made it through defensive fire and landed atop the machine, its thermite core igniting and burning their way into what Borden hoped was something important.
It turned out to be their lucky day, as the machine ground to a halt, and the Niets didn’t advance beyond its cover.
Stray shots were still coming from the stalled out tunneling machine, and Borden waited for a lull in the fire before rushing across the passage and moving down to the doorway Kali had pointed out.
She stood before it, covering his approach, and nodded back at it.
Borden growled as he stared up at the large, steel doors.
highlighted it on their HUDs.
Borden placed his last hackit over the pad. The device set to work, and fifteen seconds later, a dull groan filled the stale air as the doors began to retract into the wall.
Once they had split apart far enough for him to pass, he slipped inside and gazed up at the find as the interior lights began to activate.
Towering a hundred meters over Borden was one of the strangest contraptions he’d ever seen. He could tell that the designers of the Genevian B’muths must have drawn their inspiration from this thing, which proudly bore the name ‘Starcrusher’ on its side.
It had a long central body like a B’muth, with a huge railgun on its back. But rather than four squat walker legs, the Starcrusher had six articulated insect-like legs.
All of that made it look like some sort of crazy bug, but a bug with twelve very large missile pods on its back.
Kali whistled, as she moved inside the chamber.
COLLISION
STELLAR DATE: 12.23.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Chusa District, Cerulean, Malta
REGION: Iberia System, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire
Alison heard Illumine calling out to Del, confirming his arrival a minute before the pinnace set down in the middle of the street in front of the house.
Without another thought for Jaka and Illumine, she strode out of the house and watched the pinnace come down. If she hadn’t been so intent on killing Del for EMPing her up on the station, she would have been impressed with how skillfully he set the craft down between the large trees that lined the road.