Here’s me working for my biggest enemies, and there’s House Archival behind the targeting stick of a gun, the captain thought. Is there any other way that this mission can be so wrong?
As it happened, there was.
“Incoming!” the captain shouted as small shapes started to rise from the field of dead ships. At first, he’d thought that was all that they were—fragments of dead ships that somehow had come loose and were spinning out of their orbits thanks to the slow, chaotic accretion of time and physics.
But he realized that he was deeply wrong when he noticed one of them flare its rockets, turning its course and to propel toward them.
“Why didn’t the sensors pick them up!?” the captain was shouting. “Why can’t the sensors pick them up?” He desperately clicked through all of the available screen overlays before he realized that they were just being registered as the same blue-vectored pieces of non-powered, non-organic material. Which is clearly wrong, he thought as he saw the thrusters on another two of the small ships flare and burn.
“We can see ‘em.” The Duergar grinned as he hunched his large shoulders and looked out through his targeting visor with his almost lizard-like eyes. On the other side of the hold in an matching gunner’s chair, Cassandra did the same.
“No computer readings for them,” she called. “But we can see them. Small fighters. No bigger than a Hawk-class solo fighter. They must be wearing dampeners.”
“Dampeners!?” Eliard shouted, pulling on the ship’s wheel and turning as he did so, dropping the thruster on the lower right edge of the Mercury Blade to give them some speed. If they were fighters, they carried guns, he reasoned. “Who the hell can afford to put dampeners on a fleet of ships?”
Field-dampeners, which masked a ship’s readings, were very expensive. He wanted to install them on the Mercury Blade himself, but he couldn’t do it. They would have made smuggling runs so much easier… But here he was facing three ships with them.
“Got a visual ID on them, boss. Raiders,” Val called, fiddling with his targeting visor.
“You don’t say.” Eliard could have guessed that much himself. Raiders were like his own breed of pirates and smugglers and ne’er-do-wells, but worse. They generally shot your ship up first, then came to paw through your floating bodies and ship’s equipment in zero-G. No ransom. No bribery. Just murder.
“Guns can’t auto-target them with their dampeners on, so we’re down to line-of-sight,” Cassandra called. The captain knew that this wasn’t something that he should be worried about with Val, his chief gunner, but he had no idea if the agent was a good shot or not.
“Irie? What’s our engine power looking like?” Eliard threw the Mercury underneath one of the larger hulks and skimmed its belly.
“Not great, Captain. Didn’t I tell you that thirteen jumps in three days was ridiculous?”
“You did. But I’ll take anything you got. Ridiculous is better than dead, Mechanic,” he called, scanning the viewing windows for any signs of their tail. Without the computers to alert him with its friendly green lights and alarm orange and red lights, the captain had to rely on good old-fashioned eyeballs to see the enemy. “Call ‘em when you see ‘em!” he shouted, and a moment later had to do just that as two of the three raider vessels suddenly appeared around the end of the hulk, racing toward them.
“Eleven o’clock! One o’clock!” They were smaller than the Mercury, each one roughly half the size, and shaped a little like a dragonfly, with a cockpit in front of a long body (perhaps with a support gunner behind) as well as rotational thrusters hanging over it. Eliard knew that these types of vessels were fast and could turn on a pinprick.
“Eleven o’clock!” Val bellowed as he pulled on the firing sticks by the side of his wall-mounted chair, and Eliard felt the kick of the double rail meson cannons start firing. A repeating line of glowing green orbs of plasma spat out from underneath the body of the Mercury Blade toward its target, but the raider merely flipped a little and wove out of the way.
“One o’clock!” Cassandra copied Val’s example, but her shots went wide of their mark. In the cockpit of the Blade, Eliard saw her correct her aim as the glowing plasma strafed the edge of the hulk in a curve, but once again, the dragonfly-raider just dipped and jumped out of the way.
“Dammit!” The captain took matters into his own hands, kicking out the boosters from one edge of the Mercury Blade as he decreased the power to the other, causing them to spin and turn over themselves in a barely-controlled roll—
Cassandra shouted. From somewhere in the depths of their engineering system came clunks and bangs, but the captain gave the ship its momentum, leaning her wings into the roll and, as the movement naturally steadied out, he shot forward to the next ruin as the dragonfly-raiders opened fire and hit nothing but scrap metal behind him.
“Warn us before you do something like that, Captain!” Irie shouted over the communicators. “Engines at sixty-five percent!”
“Good. Divert as much power to the thrusters as you can,” he called back, making a turn around the next hulk and finding that they were now deep in the middle of the graveyard, surrounded by ships.
THUD-THUNK! Something clipped them, and the computers were blaring a red damage report.
External Rear Hull: minimal damage. Unknown attack type.
Now the raiders even had the gall to hit them with something, Eliard could have growled, as he selected the hollowed-out body of something large and dove the Blade straight toward it.
Suddenly, they were surrounded by darkness save for the distant starlight glinting off the torn, rusted metal. Eliard stopped all forward thrusters and threw them into a turn to face back out of the hollowed body, like a deep-sea fish hiding from its hunter.
Only this fish has got some fangs of its own. The captain signaled to his two gunners. “Open up this beast on my mark. Three. Two—”
“What? We’re inside it!” Cassandra exclaimed, but didn’t take her hands off the firing sticks.
“One!”
Val and Cassandra fired their meson cannons, and the two railguns slung underneath the Blade started spitting globs of plasma, extending and retracting to reload as the plasma hit the near walls and the mouth of the entrance, shaking, fracturing, and finally blasting the hulk into pieces before them.
As they fired, the captain hit the angled forward thrusters, and the Blade started accelerating backwards as the hulk in front of it exploded into a thousand, flaming fragments—sending a cloud of jagged metal and plasma out into the field, and the two approaching dragonfly-raiders.
THOOM! The shockwave of the first raider ship to explode reached them, even as the Blade shot out of the far end of the hulk to see the second dragonfly-raider starting to veer out of the approaching corona of debris, fail to move fast enough, and get sliced neatly in half by a piece of rusted hulk, before exploding as its twin.
“Get some!” Val roared, pounding his fists on the walls.
“There’s still one more out there, big guy.” Cassandra was less joyous as she swiveled in her chair to scan the peripherals. “Got him! On your four o’clock— He’s running away!” she shouted as Val clapped his hands, eager for more destruction.
“Leave him,” the captain called.
“What?” a horrified exclamation from the gunner.
“We don’t need to waste the ammo. As long as he’s running away, I don’t want to bother chasing him.”
“But, Captain!” Val growled as Eliard turned the Blade around, heading not deeper into the graveyard but out, beyond it into the Adiba System. And we still have to find this research station, with who knows what enemies or dangers still out there… He didn’t add as he hit the thrusters.
2
The Station
Behind them, the graveyard of ships stretched across the glittering backdrop of stars. But ahead of the Mercury Blade was what could only be described as dead waters.
It was an old phrase, Eliard knew—dating back to the t
ime when the ships that humanity and the other races traveled in moved through water, and not through pockets of gasses and electrons. But it was also a phrase that had stuck.
“Sensor readings: minimal,” he said out loud, for the benefit of Val and Cassandra still sitting in their linked gunnery chairs, and for Irie somewhere at the other end of the communications channels. From her own open channel, he could hear the thumps and muttered curses of a woman trying to get as much juice out of the Blade as possible.
“Initiating long-range scanners….” He kept a litany of his actions as he worked. They should be able to pick up any objects within almost a light-year or so. Certainly powerful enough to detect where a derelict research station was to be found.
Nothing.
That was odd. Why couldn’t they even detect the object? Like the graveyard behind them, it should still show up, even if it was powered down.
The captain raised his head from the viewing screens to look out the cockpit window. Sometimes it was better to get eyes on what was actually outside, rather than relying on computers. He could see far fewer stars in front of him than there was behind, and the ones he could see looked...odd. Fuzzy, out of focus.
Oh, no. Acting on a hunch, he ran a trace ping from the Mercury’s sensor array to the nearest deep-space satellites. They should ping back with coordinates, and the latest data-space updates…
Error! Signal Failed to Send! Retry? Y/N
N.
“Dammit!” the captain swore. He had hoped that this wasn’t the case. “But of course, this is where Armcore wanted their super-secret space station, right?”
“What is it, Captain? What have you found?” Cassandra called, lifting the targeting visor from her head.
“The Adiba System is in a fracking patch of null space. No wonder this is where Armcore kept the Device!” Eliard spat.
Cassandra groaned. Everyone knew that null space was bad. Not dangerous per se, but certainly a hazard if you were intending to spend any length of time there without backup. These were the patches of space where many hundreds or thousands of millennia ago, a black hole had once sat, eating every available molecule and particle in its vicinity until it finally ate itself into oblivion. They were hazardous because they worked as muted zones of space, with a far thinner subspace membrane with which to communicate, travel, or warp.
It will be impossible to jump out of here if we run into any trouble, Eliard thought. Or call for help. Not that he had anyone to call, he had to admit. Traveling through a patch of null space was like flying blind, with one hand tied behind your back as half of your essential ship sensors were effectively useless.
“Fine. No one had said this was going to be easy,” Eliard grumbled, swiping the digital holographic screens out of the way and relying on sight alone. “I’ll do this the old-fashioned way, then…” he mumbled, as Irie’s channel burst into activity.
“Captain? Captain! Check your three o’clock coordinates. I’ve got something really weird happening down here.” She sounded stressed, worried.
“What is it?” Eliard turned the vessel to peer out of the cockpit windows, but all he saw were more of those fuzzy, out-of-focus stars.
“I’m working on the engines, but without a steady stream of neutrinos from the subspace layer, we’re running on fumes, right?” Irie explained.
“I have no idea what you just said,” Eliard replied.
“Just that I am doing heroic work down here, and that you should give me a pay raise, right? But that isn’t all. I was running an internal scan on our warp core readings, right? And I found that we had an anomaly. A muon chain heading off your right-hand port side.”
“A moo-what?” Despite knowing his ships, Eliard had always had more of a ‘practical’ experience of spaceships, not a scientific.
“Muon. Never mind. It’s a subatomic particle. It can chain up, meaning it links to others, and it can stream through matter like light through a window,” she explained.
“I’m still not getting you. Is this abnormal?”
“Well, it only chains up thanks to a catalyst, an energy link, right? You send a charge at their frequency when you want to get something done. Send a message, deliver a charge,” Irie said hastily. “But…”
“There should be nothing to send a message to us, nothing I can see, right?” Eliard finally got the gist of the conundrum.
“Apparently.”
Eliard frowned. “Hang on, just what sort of things can you do with a muon chain?”
He was answered a moment later, as the Mercury Blade suddenly lurched, against the captain’s commands, in the direction of the invisible particles.
“Whoa. Steady there, Captain!” Cassandra called out, rocking against her harness.
“It’s not me! I’m not doing anything!” Eliard pulled down on the ship’s wheel, but all that happened was the Mercury Blade rocked even more violently to one side, before slowly spinning back to its captured position. “Irie!” The captain’s voice rose in a slightly panicked yell.
“Yeah, well, a graviton pulse is pretty much the kind of thing you could pull off with chain-linked muons,” the engineer said.
“What the hell is a graviton pulse?” Eliard yanked at the wheel. They were now starting to accelerate in one direction, rocking and wavering as the captain fought against it.
“Think tractor beams, Captain.” Her voice crackled.
“Tractor beams? That’s science fiction! They don’t exist! They’re impossible,” Eliard said, earning a snort of disgust from the trollish Duergar behind him.
“Only a stupid warrior renames an enemy with a sword a friend with a plough,” the large creature growled. Eliard guessed that was some Duergar saying, and he had no idea what it meant other than he was apparently being stupid.
“Great. Wonderful. Outstanding.” He kicked the thrusters against the pull, slowing their travel considerably and causing the Mercury Blade to shake violently.
Warning! External Hull Integrity down by fourteen percent, the computer blared at them.
“What?” Eliard shouted.
“You’ll rip us apart if you keep on fighting it!” Irie was shouting. “It’s like you’re firing all of the ship’s thrusters in different directions!”
Eliard killed the burn, sending the Blade rocking forward along its invisible pull-line. “I don’t like this,” he growled. “I want everyone on their stations in case we need to blast whatever is doing this—”
The captain never got a chance to finish his statement, as he started to see something happen in front of their ship. It was the blurred, distant starlight. They were refracting, and not because of the cockpit windows. It was as if they were being seen through a prism, or a nebula, or an energy field.
Their travel was slowing now as well, as if whatever strange machine was working on them was perfectly choreographing their approach.
El had an idea. “Irie? Can we direct a plasma vent?” He knew that the warp cores generated and ran huge amounts of plasma, which was little more than charged molecules so would do no harm to whatever this thing was, but usually the warp cores recycled the plasma back into its own efficient running.
“You could do, but it would mean that it would take even longer to charge up the warp cores,” she replied.
“We can’t jump anyway, right?”
“True. Hold on.” He heard Irie getting to work, as he worked on pulling on the ship’s wheel and hitting just one side of the thrusters to spin them around so now they were being dragged backward toward whatever had them caught.
“Accessing warp containment. Decoupling filters. Venting plasma now!” Irie called, and Eliard felt the ship rock and thrum, before spinning her around to see what effect it had.
The flaring, undulating cloud of red, orange, and purple gaseous flames spread out, expanding quickly into the frictionless void of null space, and then, all of a sudden, it burst over a shape. Eliard saw it expand along the corners of something large, flowing along panels
, holding to the bulbous corner shapes for just a moment, before evaporating completely. It was the station, and it was bigger than the Mercury Blade, but only by six or seven times. It was a shape that was broadly oval but made out of industrial-looking panels and rectangular protuberances.
“What does that remind you of?” Eliard called, already knowing his answer.
“The mechanical sphere of Armcore Prime,” Cassandra called. The same sort of make, only far smaller, and as an oval.
Getting closer now, and Eliard could start to see the thing against the backdrop of null space. It glittered with a haze over its surfaces like it was surrounded by a flush of heat, and it was this haze that hid its corners and sides when Eliard turned his head for only a moment. But the closer he got, the more he could differentiate the haze from the object itself. It was rust-metal red, with blackened scorch-marks across its form. There were still a few small lights blinking here and there, and they were approaching what looked to be an octagonal porthole section.
“It looks abandoned,” Cassandra said.
It did, but that didn’t mean for a moment that Eliard was going to bet on it. “Someone or something activated that tractor beam. Suit up.”
3
The Rats
“We’re docking.” Eliard narrated, as much to break the silence as for his crew’s benefit. The Mercury Blade slid into the open port and settled on a large gantry, where, with a slight shudder, the muon tractor beam that had been holding them clicked off, without any sign of where it had come from or who had operated it in the first place.
“Captain?” Turning around, he saw that Val and Cassandra were already wearing their tactical suits—large carapace shoulder pads and breastplates, along with heavy, clanking boots and greaves on their arms and shins. Val’s in particular looked ferocious, as it had been designed specifically for Duergar use, and was styled to look like scales. He had the Judge, his favorite rifle that was the size of a small artillery weapon, plus his other assorted guns and hand blades. Just seeing him made Eliard think that they had a chance. Nothing can take down Val, after all, he tried to convince himself.
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