by Rob Dearsley
“Stay put, or next time I’ll turn it up to full power.” Jax’ voice sounded unusually firm and authoritative.
The Terran let out a bark of laughter, slumping against the bulkhead. At the same moment, Luc burst in holding a rifle like the one Arland‘s.
“Stand down,” Arland said, clutching her side. Her ribs were broken. She could feel them shifting as her nanites went to work. It was a damn odd sensation – feeling her own bones set themselves.
Arland shook her head, trying to clear her vision, and looked up to where the Terran sat. “We don’t want to hurt you.”.
The Terran let out another short bark of laughter. “You shot me.”
“It wasn’t personal,” Arland replied. “You attacked the captain.”
“You’re military?”
Arland nodded. “Lieutenant Shauna Arland, Systems’ Defence Force.” She omitted the ‘ex’.
Luc tracked the Terran as she pushed up and walked toward Arland, extending a hand to help her up. “Commander Hannah Hale, Terran Imperial Navy. Where are we? This isn’t a Terran ship.” She frowned. “It’s too small.”
“This is the Hope’s Folly,” the captain said, straightening his rumpled shirt.
“I need to contact Imperial Command. What are you?” Hale looked between the four of them. “Traders? Salvage?”
“Kinda,” Luc said. “It’s complicated.”
Hale spun on Luc and the captain. Both Arland and Luc snapped their weapons up in a heartbeat. Arland had to double take – there was genuine fear on the Terran’s face. “You’re trying to salvage the fleet? You can’t.”
It was the captain’s turn to laugh. “No one’s going to stop us. The Imperium’s long gone.”
“Besides,” Arland added, “there are only Terran ships here, no signs of any alien vessels.”
“Aliens?” Hale’s brow wrinkled in confusion.
“Yeah, the ones you were fighting.” The captain returned the Terran’s confused look. “We’ve all heard the stories. Heck, we’ve seen them.”
“What stories?” Hale asked. “How long was I out?”
“You may want to sit down,” Vaughn said, rising, rubbing his neck.
“How long?” Hale perched on the edge of the bed, next to her cryo-pod.
“Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to say this. I’m just going to come straight out with it. Like pulling off a bandage. Best to just get it over with.”
Luc interrupted the doctor. “The Terran Empire fell nearly fifty-thousand years ago.”
Hale’s eyes widened in shock. Disbelief, fear and a dozen other emotions raced across her face. Her shoulders slumped, and she hunched over, her hands loose in her lap.
“What happened,” Arland asked. “Why were you in cryo-sleep?”
“It was Matthews, my— the weapons officer. Someone had to get back to the Imperium and let them know what happened. The pod was supposed to be launched. I guess we lost control before then.”
“Err, guys,” Jax’s voice interrupted them. “I’m getting power readings from the wrecks. Looks like they’re spooling up their drive systems.”
Hale’s face filled. “You have to get out of here.”
“We can’t.” The captain avoided eye contact. If he’d brought back the superconductors, then that’s exactly what they would be doing.
“You don’t understand,” Hale pressed. “We will all die, or worse. We have to get out of here and warn your military.”
The captain let out an exasperated breath. “We can’t go. Our FTL drive is bust. We were hoping to get parts from one of those ships to repair it.”
“We should go over as soon as we can then,” Luc said. “Take a full breaking kit this time.”
“If you’re going back, you’ll do it armed,” Arland said.
◊◊
Dannage slipped into the pilot’s seat, spinning the ship around to face the three closest, intact Terran ships. Arland, Luc, and the Terran, Hale, followed him into the small bridge compartment, Hale stooping to get through the door.
Hale stepped up alongside Dannage, bending to look out the window. “The Freyja, the Hlin.” She pointed to the two smaller ships. “And that’s the Odin.” She pointed to the carrier. “Any of them will have what you need, but we must hurry. If the ships are powering up, then the Core Minds are waking.”
“Core Mind?” Arland asked. “Is that something the aliens used against you?”
“Why do you keep asking about aliens?” Hale asked, her brow furrowing in an exceptionally cute way.
“We can sort this later. Luc, Arland, get kitted up.” Dannage pulled the Folly toward the Hlin.
“I’ll come with you.” Hale made to follow them.
“Ain't got any gear that would fit you. You’re better here with the cap’n. You can guide us from one of these consoles.” Luc gestured toward the stations at the back of the small bridge.
Dannage tuned the rest of them out and focused on getting the Folly through the constantly shifting debris field. This must have been a huge fleet. Tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of ships. He would love to have seen them in their day, before they were all sent off to fight in some ancient battle. It didn’t look like they’d won, but they must have at least fought their enemies to a standstill.
He pulled his ship around an orphaned bank of escape pods, bringing the squat form of the Hlin into clear view.
“Commander Hale, where’s the best place to dock?” he asked. Her raw physicality unnerved him. There was no doubt: she could kill him as easily as he'd break a toothpick.
Hale's voice made him start. “There’s a loading bay toward the back.”
He saw it, against the huge bulk of the ship. It looked like a low, wide slot. He guessed it was four or five decks high. Easily big enough to land the Folly. A couple of commands and the navcon had a route traced on the HUD.
He hit the com for the hold. “Luc, Arland, ETA five minutes.”
The Hlin filled the window as he followed the blue line toward her docking bay. He had the impression of being a bug, desperate to not get squashed underfoot.
“Can we pressurise the bay once we’re inside?”
“There are controls in the bay that your people can activate,” Hale replied.
He left it at that, focusing on getting the Folly into the wide bay. The place was a mess. Crates, pallets and barrels scattered across the deck in a haphazard fashion.
Gnawing on the inside of his cheek in concentration, he brought the ship down on an open patch of floor. The groan as her struts took her weight reverberated through the hull. He let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding and punched the com control.
“Luc, you’re good to go. Looks like this one has gravity.”
◊◊
Arland pulled on the release lever and the Folly’s bay doors slid open. It was a ten-foot drop from there to the grubby dock floor.
“You gunna give me a hand with this?” Luc dragged a ladder across the Folly’s cargo hold.
Flashing him a bright smile, she grabbed the other end of the ladder. Once they had it in place, she started down ahead of Luc, her rifle slung over one shoulder.
Bracing her feet on the outside of the ladder, she slid down the last five feet, eager to get onto the Terran ship in spite of everything. She was actually on a Terran warship. It was enough to make her giddy with excitement. She tried to suppress her grin.
Her rifle already in her hands, she scanned the bay for signs of movement. Behind her, Luc hit the deck, pulling his own rifle from his back.
“Clear,” Arland said.
“As far as we can see anyway,” Luc added. “Close her up.”
“Happy hunting out there.” The captain’s voice came through her earpiece.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Lieutenant, do you copy?” Hale’s voice filtered through her com.
“Five by five, sir.” Damn, it felt good working with military personnel.
“There
should be a console off the Folly’s two o-clock. Approximately two hundred metres out.”
Arland couldn’t help smiling as she scanned the indicated area. There it was, barely visible behind a stack of crates.
Keeping her head on the swivel, trying to cover every direction at once, she headed toward the console. She didn’t like the bay; there were too many hiding spots. The aliens could be there, waiting for the perfect moment to leap out and tear them to pieces. Her skin tried to crawl up and off the top of her head. Despite it all, she couldn’t stop grinning.
“Easy, Arland.” Luc's voice held a hint of concern.
She gritted her teeth and ignored them.
The console stood in front of her, its control screen set at her eye level.
“Luc, cover me.”
While Luc scanned the bay, she pulled a crate over and clambered onto it. Now at least, she could see the controls clearly.
“I’m at the console.”
“There’s a status bar on the right,” Hale said. “Beside that, there’s two switches. The top one closes the door the second one pressurises the bay.”
“Top switch, door, bottom switch, pressure,” Arland recited, reaching for the top switch.
For a moment, nothing happened. Arland was just about to call Hale and ask what to do when she felt the deck vibrate beneath her feet. The bay door began to slide down. The vibrations got worse. Arland grabbed for the console to stop from falling.
The longer it went on the worse the vibrating seemed to get. Stacks of crates went tumbling around them. Luckily, the Folly’s wide profile kept it stable during the mini quake.
Finally, the door crunched into the lower locking mechanism, and the vibrating stopped. Arland released her death grip on the console.
“Well, if they didn’t know we were here, they do now,” Luc commented.
She almost laughed. His comment mirrored hers back on Kyanite. She pulled the second switch. The vents came on, blowing a haze of dust into the room. The console’s pressure bar climbed, and external sounds came back in. Luc pulled an air checker from a belt pouch, cracked the seal and waved it in front of him. The liquid inside turned a light green.
“Air’s good,” he said, breaking the seal on his helmet.
Arland cracked her own helmet, pulling the visor up and taking a breath. The air was stale, with an odd metallic undertow, but otherwise seemed fine.
“Miss Hale, what’s our best bet for finding superconductors?” Luc asked.
“The Core Mind would be your best bet, but it’ll be swarming with the— the creatures. Go for engineering, there should be some there,” Hale replied over the com.
Arland looked up. She could just make out Hale and the captain through the Folly’s windows.
Luc lightly punched her on the arm. “Come on, let’s get moving.” He flicked the com on. “Miss Hale, what’s the best way to get to engineering?”
Hale directed them out of the bay and into the darkened corridors of the ship. Arland flipped on both her helmet and gun-mounted lights, panning their bright beams around the hallway. The light glinted off the red-brown form of one of the creatures. She dropped into a combat crouch, flicking her gun’s safety off. Her hands tightened around the weapon, ready to defend herself. Luc’s light-beams joined her own. Showing the decaying mess where the creature’s head should have been. She let out a breath, relaxing her white-knuckled grip on her weapon.
“Easy, Arland.” Luc stepped past her, scanning the hallway. His suit lights picked out more dead creatures. Lots more.
But no human – or Terran – casualties. It struck her as odd. She would have expected some sign of human suffering in a fight like this. She stepped over a creature that had been practically ripped in half by weapons fire to kneel next to Luc.
He poked a pile of shell casings with the barrel of his rifle. They clinked, rolling across the floor. They were big, twenty-five, maybe even thirty calibre rounds, the kind of thing she’d only ever seen on mounted weapons. Although, having seen Hale, they would probably be comparable to heavy rifle rounds at Terran scale. Still, they couldn't be ship-safe.
“Big fight here.” More shells clinked as Luc moved.
Arland agreed. “But where are the human casualties?”
“We wondered the same thing on the Heimdall.” Luc turned to face her, almost blinding her with his helmet lamps. “Come on. I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”
Luc moved off, leaving Arland alone in the dark and surrounded by the dead monsters. Suppressing the urge to shiver, she hurried after him.
They were fifteen minutes into their walk through the ship, being guided by Hale, when the lights came on.
Arland let out a startled cry, throwing up her arm to shield her eyes. After the near pitch dark, the sudden brightness was blinding. She squinted into the newly lit corridor, one hand coming up to open her ship-to-shore com.
“Sir, Commander, the lights just came back on.”
“The ship’s systems are coming back online,” Hale said. Arland could hear worry in the Terran Officer’s voice. “I’d say you’ve got maybe twenty minutes before Hlin’s fully functional.”
“What will happen then?” Arland asked, not quite sure she wanted to hear the answer.
“It will continue its mission. The internal sensors will guide the cre— the creatures to you.”
Luc asked, “How far to engineering?”
“Not far, you need to go up two levels. You should be able to get there in five minutes.”
“Let’s hustle.” Luc started off down the corridor at a light jog, his pack bouncing off his back as he went.
Arland couldn’t shake the feeling there was something off about this whole thing, that there was more here than they knew. Hale was hiding something, or at least not telling them everything. She seemed confused when they talked about the aliens. But she must have seen them. According to the captain, there had been thousands on the Heimdall.
They climbed up into the engineering compartment, Luc first. It slightly rankled her. She should have taken point, but Luc had insisted. She came off the ladder, dropping into a combat crouch, scanning the room. It was similar to the plans of the Heimdall’s engine room but on a smaller scale. The collider ring curved away from them through the back wall. It was bracketed at various points by ‘C’ shaped structures, suspended from heavy duty gantries. Her eyes strayed to something at the base of the structure.
She was so distracted by the base of the collider, she almost forgot to check for enemies. Fortunately for her, Luc was the only other person in the compartment. The only one alive at least.
She could feel the odd tugging of the collider’s gravity-well against her hair. She looked down at the uniformed bodies clustered on the floor.
The Terran soldiers still clutched their oversized guns. Their black and red armour looked aggressive. Blocky strike plates arrayed across their backs and down their arms were jointed by large hex bolts. The item in their midst was unmistakable: a bomb. They’d been so desperate they’d tried to scuttle their own ship. Had the aliens come that close to taking it over?
She knelt to look at the bomb. The counter was still set at five minutes. Not long enough for any of them to get away.
“Tick-tock, Arland.” Luc rooted through supply crates looking for the superconductor cables they needed. She felt momentarily ashamed. He'd stayed on mission while she’d been distracted.
As she stood, Arland knocked one of the Terrans. The big man fell onto his back, glassy eyes staring up at the collider ring.
And she knew what Hale was being evasive about. By all the Stars in all the heavens, what had they done?
Five
- TDF Hlin, Feldspar System -
Arland looked down at the dead Terran. Her mind stalled. She couldn’t quite understand what she was seeing, or she didn’t want to.
“Arland! Arland!” Luc grabbed her roughly by the shoulders. “Stars, woman, what’s wrong?” His voi
ce dried up as he saw the dead Terran. “Earth and Stars. That’s, that’s—” Words failed him. She could understand.
The left half of the Terran’s face was normal. He’d been ruggedly handsome, blond with bright blue eyes. The right half of his face was another story. Red-brown mottling spread across his cheek, along his jaw and down beneath the collar of his shirt. His human blue eye had been replaced with a row of three, black, compound eyes. The top of his head started to flare out.
Arland checked the other officers, rolling them onto their backs. She didn’t want to, but somehow, felt she had to. All bar one of them had started to change, patches of ruddy standstone-like skin marring their faces and arms. Their features twisted, frozen part way through the transformation.
That was why there weren’t any human bodies. A new question raced into her mind. How had this happened?
The answer was obvious. Why send in your own men when you could do this to your enemy and watch them tear themselves apart?
“We have ten minutes,” Luc said quietly, almost reverently.
She nodded, pulling herself together. “Did you find the cable?”
“Not yet.”
She nodded again, still shaken, and they headed over to the storage boxes.
It didn’t take long for Arland to find the right box. Breaking the lock with her pry bar, she pulled out a heavy coil of cable. A quick check showed her the red flashing on the ends.
“Got it,” she called.
“Good,” Luc replied, stuffing something into his own bag. “Found clothing. Thought Hale might appreciate something that fits.”
“Intruder alert,” a shrill voice boomed through the room.
Luc swore. Arland agreed with the sentiment.
“Intruder—” The voice changed mid-alarm. “Kill them all, the humans must burn.”
“What in the heavens?” Luc asked.
Arland didn’t bother to answer. They ran for the ladder they’d used on the way in.
Luc was already on the ladder when the first scream erupted through the room. Arland turned and fired, the roar of the gunshots echoing through the large chamber. The creature leapt aside inhumanly fast, Arland’s fire pockmarking a stack of crates. She fired again, hits sparking off the creature’s tan hide. The impacts knocked the creature off course but did little to deter it. The ship-safe ammo hadn’t even penetrated its skin. Stars, they were tough.
