Dalida: A Scifi Space Opera Adventure

by G. P. Eliot

  And it is capable of unleashing more power than an entire Union city, all at once, maybe a Union planet! Hank knew as he reached up carefully, still expecting something terrible to go wrong–to grab it.

  His hands touched the cool and smooth surfaces, feeling the multiple hundreds and thousands of facets at the end. It wasn’t as heavy as he imagined it would be as he cradled it to himself and stepped back.

  The klaxons abruptly switched off. As did all of the red warning lights.

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Steed whispered into the smoke-filled silence.

  “Depends how you look at it,” said a new voice, one that boomed around the room from the sensors of the broken column itself. It was a woman’s voice, and it was one that Hank knew well.

  “Ida-baby!” he shouted happily. “You made it!”

  “Of course, I did, Boss,” she said. It still sounded like the Ida that he knew–but not entirely. There was the old cocky confidence that he had come to associate with her personality, but also a deeper, more dignified and powerful tone. As if she knew her own strength.

  “Gentlemen, I have some very good news and some very bad news,” Ida announced to them.

  “Good,” Steed asked for.

  “Bad,” Hank said in the same moment.

  “Time enough for both,” Ida laughed–and it was a musical sound, like shimmering crystals. But there was something about it that was also a little bit terrifying at the same time, Hank thought. Like the sort of laugh that a shark might have if it could talk.

  “The good news is that you have the Ubix Crystal, and it is so powerful that you may never need to upgrade or power the Dalida for as long as your natural lives–if you biologicals live that long,” the A.I. said.

  She’s never called me a biological before, Hank thought to himself. He wondered just what had transpired down there in the code-war between his Ida-baby and the Union Apollon.

  “But the bad news is that removing the crystal has triggered an auto-destruct of the facility, which is linked to the planet’s internal volcanic pressures,” Ida said.

  “You mean the planet’s going to explode?” Hank said dryly.

  “You always put things so simply, boss,” Ida purred at him. Although it was good to hear her flirt with him again, to Hank it was a bit like being flirted with by a lioness.

  “Can’t you override it?” Hank said. “If you killed the Apollon, then you have control over the facility, don’t you?”

  “I’ve already tried, but I’m afraid not, Boss,” Ida sighed. “This is a framework legacy system built into the mechanics of the entire facility. I can only assume the Elites didn’t want anyone following them after they had recovered the crystal here,” she said.

  “Or any evidence left behind,” Steed muttered.

  “Quickest way out?” Hank asked.

  “There is a transport shuttle. Follow the doors–but you will have to be approximately 2.3 times faster than the average running human,” Ida said. Hank knew that she was probably trying to be helpful but putting everything into stark numbers like that really wasn’t helping.

  “You heard the lady,” Hank said, as a door hissed open at the far end of the cavern. “Run for it!”

  36

  “How do you steer this goddam thing!?” Hank snarled as he sat in what, technically, was the pilot’s chair of the small shuttle.

  The three men had run through the shaking facility as the lights burst and wires exploded from the walls behind them. Their only guidance had come from the automated metal doors that had whisked open ahead of them, as Ida had cleared the path for their panicked escape to the shuttle.

  What they had found was a small, blocky Union-made shuttle with two seats at the front of the vessel and a row of X-harness seats in the middle. But there had appeared absolutely no way to reach the walled-off engines, and neither did the shuttle have any sort of piloting apparatus.

  As soon as the three men had thrown themselves into their seats, the X-harnesses had auto-locked around them, the airlock doors had hissed closed, and the screen ahead had started to blue.

  “The engines are on automatic, just like the rest of the shuttle,” Ida stated as Hank once again hammered at the console in front of his seat. Every time his fingers touched the screen, it made a negative chime of refusal.

  “But where is it going to take us!” Hank said as the screen ahead started to lighten in color.

  They were rocketing up a launch-tube that seemed to cut straight upwards from the middle of the planet itself. As there were no controls or read-outs on their engines or navigational computers, it was impossible for Hank to tell how fast they were going.

  “I mean, does this thing have an FTL drive? Is it going to jump us?” Hank was shouting. He didn’t voice his much deeper concern, which was:

  What if the shuttle is pre-programmed just to jump us straight back towards the nearest Union military base? This entire place had been built for use by the Elites, after all–what if their plan had always been just to travel here, retrieve the crystal, and then return to the Message Center or one of the major Union home worlds?

  “No FTL drive, Boss,” Ida said–and she sounded a little weary to Hank’s ears. Almost as if she was exasperated with his human ‘biological’ concerns.

  The Captain was about to demand that she read the shuttle’s computers to find out where it was taking them, but then there was a sudden jolt as the small grey vessel burst from the mantle of the planet.

  The windows all around them glared bright with the brilliance of sunlight, and Hank blinked, recovering himself just as he heard Steed gasp.

  “You should really look at this, Captain…” Steed was saying. The Confederate was craning forward in his seat, looking out of the nearest window. Hank did the same—

  To see a world in turmoil.

  The surface of the planet beneath them was starting to ripple and rock as great subterranean forces were released. On their right, Hank saw rockslides start to pour down the sides of sharp-edged, grey-stone mountains. As he watched, and the shuttle shook around them with the force of their acceleration, great plumes of smoke burst from the lowland canyons as fissures started to open up, and race along the surface in crazy, zig-zagging designs.

  “She’s breaking up!” Madigan said in horror.

  “Uh, Ida?” Hank whispered. “Can you speed us up at all?”

  “Negative, Boss,” his personal A.I. still sounded completely tired. “The shuttle is on auto-pilot. I’ve already explained that to you,”

  No need to be so catty, Hank frowned.

  Great catastrophes started to roll out across the planet around them. Everywhere that Hank turned his head, he saw worse and worse visions of hell. The mountain range that they were trying to get above began to splinter as entire mountains started to slip down into promethean crevasses, and other mountains broke apart.

  Glowing red lines of lava burst from the carcasses of the peaks, surging across the landscape and setting up waves of crimson fire that washed over everything in its path.

  The shuttle shook as a shockwave hit it–there, rising ahead of them was a massive plume of black, grey, and yellow smoke, and it was pregnant with great boulders of burning rock like meteors—

  “Evasive maneuvers!” Hank called out, but the shuttle kept on its course, straight towards the detonating volcano. “Ida!” He screamed as the sky ahead of them turned to one of black ash.

  “I already told you, Boss…” she was saying, just as the shuttle flipped on its side and fired some sort of positional thrusters, shooting upwards to skim the rising cloud of destruction.

  “This shuttle is automated. It has its own pre-programmed hazard programs,” Ida said in a completely-confident manner.

  Hank gritted his teeth. “Well, I prefer to be in charge of my own death, thank you very much…” he said, as the sky above them started to flare.

  Streamers of flame and plasma swept across the forward screens of the shuttl
e as they hit escape velocity. Hank and the others were thrown back into their seats as the G-forces took them. The screens flared a burning white—

  And then black.

  Their sudden sense of acceleration stopped as they broke through the upper mesosphere of the facility planet and were now racing into the vacuum of space. The X-harnesses auto-released as the shuttle curved in an arc over the top of the planet. Hank and the others rose in the zero-gravity, swinging their bodies around and using their hands to grab onto the railings and the tops of the chairs to re-position themselves.

  Out of the windows they could see that the entire surface of the planet below them was being covered in a thick blanket of black smoke. Flashes of lightning and glares of immense red fire shone through this new toxic atmosphere, looking as though the planet was being bombarded by nuclear explosions.

  “Well, looks like no one is going to be colonizing that place any time soon,” Madigan murmured.

  “No,” Hank had to admit. The entire place looked thrown into the middle of a nuclear winter that could last a few hundred years. Which is pretty perfect if you want to keep your escape facility secret for the next few generations, he considered.

  But there were other, more pressing concerns even than a dying planet. Like where they were going. Hank pulled himself back down to the console, looking for any signs or clues of coordinates. There were none.

  What there was, however, was the small gleam of reflected star light hovering over the dead world, growing larger as they drew closer to it. It was the Dalida.

  “Of course,” Hank sighed. “The Dalida was the pre-planned generation ship, wasn’t it? This shuttle was automated to return to it, safely in orbit…” he said as they raced towards its nearest Launch Bay.

  The only problem was that apart from a cluster of outboard lights around the distant Bridge at the far end–the rest of the Dalida appeared to be dark.

  Dead.

  “Hello?” Hank called out as soon as he managed to leave the shuttle.

  “There’s no gravity,” Steed muttered, in what Hank thought was a fairly obvious statement.

  The shuttle had magnet-clamped to the holding pad of the Launch Bay, but the rest of the entire room was in a state of suspended freefall. Hank saw a small Styrofoam cup slowly spinning across the middle of the Bay, as well as the sparkle of assorted nuts and bolts, pens, or other minor items.

  “Why did they turn off the gravity?” Hank said. Thankfully, the Launch Bay still had working automated drones, and Ida had communicated with the Dalida’s servitor drones outside to bring Hank a new encounter suit, which they had airlocked-through into the shuttle. Now dressed in his new suit, Hank felt a little bit more secure.

  “80% of all non-critical ship systems are disabled,” Ida confirmed from the inside of Hank’s bubble helmet.

  “Scan for life forms,” Hank whispered as he pushed himself through, swimming through the middle of the Launch Bay like he was a merman, straight for the inner bulkhead doors.

  “None in Decks 0 through 7,” Ida confirmed.

  None? “The Bridge?” Hank asked worriedly. He was already pulling himself via the grab rails to the nearby weapons locker, pulling the red mechanical release for the door to pop open. There were four light laser rifles in place, as well as a small med-kit. Hank wasted no time throwing the medkit to Madigan, and handing out the laser rifles.

  “The Bridge is shielded, boss…” Ida said. “She’s been separated from the rest of the Dalida’s mainframe. No hard-line access.”

  “What?” Hank shook his head. But that was crazy. You only completely separated Bridge facilities from the rest of a ship when you had some catastrophic event, but you needed to create a small command ‘lifeboat’ at the heart of the vessel.

  “Professor Serrano and Cortez could have been attempting to preserve life-support systems, during my battle with the Apollon,” Ida suggested.

  “Could,” Hank repeated. He didn’t like not being sure. “Come on,” he said to the others, as he winched the bulkhead wheel and followed them through.

  They had managed to climb all the way up to Level 7, just under the Bridge before something tried to kill them…

  “Agh!” Hank’s body slammed to the floor of the Main Command Corridor in Level 7 as the gravity was abruptly turned on. Beside him, Madigan and Steed similarly fell from the vacuum like dropped stones.

  The overhead lights, which had been dark before now, flared with sudden brilliance, momentarily blinding them.

  “Don’t move, Captain!” a familiar voice hissed.

  It was a voice that Hank knew only too well. A man’s voice, and one that was now synonymous to him with nightmares. That was because the man who owned it had used that strange, almost-electronic voice to whisper and purr and berate and scream at him all through the long hours of the Captain’s ‘interrogation!’

  “Jackal!” Hank rolled across the floor, bringing his light laser rifle up in the direction of the voice.

  But there was no one there. He was aiming his gun at the wall intercom, just above the command panel by the doors to the Bridge.

  “Do you really believe that I would be so stupid as to present myself to you in person?” the Jackal made his eerie, high-pitched barking chuckle. Hank wondered if that was how the cyborg had earned his nickname, after all.

  “Show yourself, Jackal!” Hank growled as he slowly got up, keeping his rifle levelled at the Bridge doors. He was sure that the Jackal must be on the other side of them, and as soon as those doors opened, he would put a blast of super-heated plasma straight through the Jackal’s evil heart.

  “I see that our time apart has not made you a wiser man, Captain Snider,” the Jackal sniggered.

  “Ida? See what you can do with the door,” Hank whispered into his private channel.

  “I’m sorry, Boss–but the Bridge is running on its own reserve power supply. There’s nothing I can do to get that door open,” Ida stated. “But as soon as we get past the Bridge’s electromagnetic shielding, I’ll be able to connect up with the Dalida’s central computers once again…”

  “Then I’ll get those doors open for you,” Hank said, and fired his rifle at the joint between the doors. Steed and Madigan joined him in the instant he fired, and three bolts of red-white fire lanced towards the doors to send up an explosion of sparks. The door seal started to glow a cherry red, and molten lines of silver started to run from its edge.

  “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you, Captain,” the voice of the Jackal announced.

  “Scared of a little challenge, Jackal?” Hank growled, keeping his trigger firmly held down.

  But then another voice appeared over the intercom.

  Lory’s.

  “Hank–it’s me,” she said. Her voice sounded hesitant, weak. “I’m on the Bridge. With the Jackal and his men. He has me, the Professor and Cortez hostage–and he’s saying that unless you stop firing and hand over the Ubix crystal, he’ll kill us all.”

  Damn! Hank gritted his teeth and hissed in frustration. His finger instantly released on the trigger, and Steed and Madigan’s bolts of laser fire finished just as abruptly.

  “Captain? What do you want us to do?” Madigan murmured. “We can rush them…”

  “No.” Hank’s voice adamant. There was no way that he was going to let Lory take the pain for his actions, again.

  “This is just like Reeve’s Ridge,” Hank whispered to himself.

  Reeve’s Ridge had been a long time ago, on a contested Confederate-Union world.

  Well, not so much contested, Hank thought. More sort of obliterated.

  It was a nowhere sort of world whose climate was too cold and whose soil structure was too poor to support any major scale agriculture. The only strategic importance that it held had been that it was the first location in the ever-expanding war between the Union and the Confederacy.

  Reeve’s Ridge was the last hide-out of the Confederate ‘dissidents’ here, as Captain Hank Snider had though
t of them then. The Union destroyers had come in and softened up the planet with air-blast missiles, and then the teams of Marines had gone in.

  And Captain Snider had been on the infiltration team.

  Three teams attacking from the East, and my team infiltrating the ridge complex from the West, Hank remembered. The Confederates had been so busy trying to stop the barrage of artillery fire from Hank’s colleagues that their guards to the West had been easy to overcome.

  The Confederate’s mistake had been using local warlords, Hank remembered. Back then the Confederacy had been much smaller–a ragtag operation who thought of itself as a nation. In reality, the Confederacy had to have a shady alliance between lots of different mercenaries, smugglers, pirates, and bandits.