The Belt Loop _Book One

by Robert B. Jones

  Several members around the table nodded and some did not.

  “You know the standing orders, Coni,” a grizzled one-star to her right said. “Any first contact must be reported immediately to Fleet Command. Had those simple rules been followed twelve years ago, the Varsonian War might have been avoided.” The speaker was the other one-star in the room, a wrinkled Colonial Navy veteran of just about every encounter the Fleet had in the last thirty years. His name was Oren Standi. It was widely reported that Standi was next in line for Admiral Paine’s chair should the current head of operations get kicked up to the fifth floor and a third star. Standi was a thin but muscular man in his late-fifties and was completely hairless. The corded neck jutting out of his tunic was lined with thin purple scars.

  “That I am well aware of, Oren, but nevertheless, Haad leaves us with a lot of things to speculate on,” Berger said.

  One of the staff captains spoke next. “I think Haad has done the correct thing,” Captain Fraze said. “As a front line officer, he had no choice. He’s out in the Loop and not rotating through some kind of bullshit picket assignment past the Fringes.”

  Admiral Paine said, “Of course, you’re all correct. What I’m more interested in is how we should react. Haad was very efficient in getting that courier boat here. We should return the favor by being efficient in getting him an answer. Let’s go over what we know.”

  The discussion went around the room for more than an hour. Paine sent one of his staff officers out for a look at the Fleet assignments in the region and he also wanted to know the nearest ships to the Corpus Christi’s position. He had to deflect a few arguments back to calmness and never allowed the discussion to reach the point of petty name-calling. At the end of the briefing, two distinct possibilities presented themselves: one, he could wait for further dispatches from Haad; two: he could order two destroyers and one tender to the Belt Loop to aid in whatever fashion was commensurate with what they found once on site.

  Admiral Paine was leaning toward option one. Ten minutes of jingoistic oratory by Captain Fraze changed his mind. Since the outward push from Earth began almost four hundred years ago, the typical colonist had developed an almost religious attachment to all things colonial. It was rare to find anyone in the colonies and especially anyone in the military out here that was not born and bred on a planet hundreds of light-years from Earth. They brooked no interference from home, made all of their own decisions based on local issues and reported to no one. Earth was almost a year away at star-drive speeds and their influence here in the colonies was minimal. Envoys from Earth showed up only during election cycles back home and since the Great World Integration back in 2510, even those bloated politicians were seen less and less. To them, “Fringies” were a non-issue and only if the steady flow of hydrogen was somehow cut off would a delegation of Earth’s world leaders venture out this far. For all intents and purposes, the colony at Elber Prime was an administrative district unto itself and cleaved only to the Colonial Navy.

  Finally Admiral Paine gave the orders.

  Chapter 16

  At the exact moment Rear Admiral Paine was giving his orders to the Fleet, Fleet Admiral Har Hansen was working his way up a vertical shaft toward deck nine. Hansen, by virtue of his high rank and superior plans, had managed just twenty minutes before to slip out of his duct back on deck eleven. He found an empty lab — science or communications, or whatever — and crawled out of the vent and dropped to the deck after a brief toe-dance on the top of a cluttered desk.

  Har then managed to sneak his way into a head and did his necessaries without being seen. He washed his face and checked his clothing. He was a dirty mess. He couldn’t remember what prompted him to leave his lair without so much as a clean t-shirt to change into. When his mother saw his clothes she was going to be really pissed. He gave his underarms a quick sniff and rubbed some of the liquid soap from the dispenser between his hands and rubbed them around his armpits. He dried his hands and was about to head back to the passageway when he heard voices. Coming his way!

  He looked around the small compartment and made a beeline for one of the open stalls at the rear of the head. Hopefully whoever was coming in here would only have to piss. Otherwise, his little sojourn was at an end without him ever getting the opportunity to kick some alien-worm ass.

  Har jumped silently up onto the toilet seat with both feet and held his breath. The hatch opened and two unseen voices assaulted his ears.

  “Not on your life,” the first voice said.

  “Then, you should feel lucky to just stay in the Navy, Burt.” This from a higher, squeakier voice.

  “Yeah, I should. But I got me over seventeen-hundred credits saved up, and me and Wanni have a place all picked out.”

  Har heard clothing being rearranged and velcro fasteners being undone.

  A moment of silence then the unmistakable sound of urine on metal.

  “All I’m saying, you need to stop and think before you tie the knot. I tried that shit with that gal from Bayliss and, man, I’ll tell you what, before the boat left the docking station she was already going down on half the base.”

  A little chuckle from the first man. “You just got the wrong one,” Burt said.

  A grunt from Squeaky. “I guess.”

  Closing pants. Auto-flushing sounds. Water running in the metal sinks.

  Har shifted his weight slightly.

  “You hear something, man?”

  Silence.

  “Naw. That’s just the sound of your credits flying out of orbit.”

  Laughter.

  The hatch closed. Whew, Har sighed, that was a close one. He waited a few minutes and finally made his way out of the head and retraced his steps to the empty lab compartment.

  Time to push on.

  * * *

  Like a marble statue Maxine Hansen stood still, her mouth open. She was on a good-sized platform overlooking a scene right out of the right panel of Bosch’s The Garden Of Earthly Delights triptych. Thousands of the bird-like aliens were strewn across a metal plain of total carnage. Parts of bird bodies were scattered in the distance as far as the eye could see. Bones and metal rods and crushed birds and parts of disgorged pods. Then she thought. How could she be seeing this? Then she looked up.

  The abattoir chamber was lighted! Hundreds of lights dotted the overhead and that same overhead was a maze of tubes and pipes. Those larger ones were pulsating and slowly pumping something she couldn’t imagine to other parts of the ship. Was this the “heart” chamber Haslip and Gertz had been talking about?

  Hansen looked at her companions. All of them were just as still as she was.

  “Commander Gertz, Haslip here.”

  “I’ve got you,” Gertz said from the bridge.

  “Geez, Milli, have you ever seen anything like this?”

  “Negative. I, I don’t know what to tell you!”

  “There’s thousands of those things in here. Dead. They’ve been slaughtered. This was no routine fight. Whatever did this took lessons in extreme violence. These parts have been torn and mangled in some kind of killing frenzy. Ritualistic murder would be my guess.” Haslip stopped her commentary and panned her helmet around.

  “What are those things, Gena? Something’s not making much sense. We’ve been looking for worms and now we get birds. Is this some sort of reverse morality play writ large?”

  Haslip shook her head. “Well, you’re gonna find out soon enough. I sent one of those things back in a bag. Looks like it suffocated when its pod fell and ruptured. You seeing this? There’s still hundreds of those pods hanging from the walls and the overhead. Like this was a kind of nursery or something. I wouldn’t venture a guess as to whether any of those unopened cocoons hold anything viable in them.”

  “Roger, that,” Gertz said.

  “Commander Haslip, Mason here. Tell me more about that new chamber you’re in.”

  Haslip hesitated and finally realized that Gertz had been talking to her from the br
idge. “Right, sir. It seems that this chamber is still penultimate to the control compartments. I would judge it to be sixty by eighty meters and laterally smaller than the hold we just left. Its ringed with catwalks and more of those perch ladders. I can’t detect any kind of control stations or consoles, sir, we’ve just entered this space. But, one thing I can tell you, though. This room has atmosphere. I’m getting readings of pressure and gasses. High in nitrogen hydrides and probably unbreathable. That’s my guess.”

  “Okay, understood. Keep your men under cover for the duration, Gena. I would suggest that you try to continue to make your trek forward. Stay on the walls if you can and try not to disturb the roost.”

  “Hey, Gena, you know what I think?” from Milli Gertz.

  “That we should get the fuck out of here?”

  Silence from the bridge.

  “How do we know this gore all around this compartment isn’t toxic? I mean, this blood and ooze could be infectious,” Haslip moaned.

  “Not after all of these years, commander. The first potassium-argon dating on that mucus is done. That stuff is almost two thousand years old.”

  “Commander Gertz, Lieutenant Hansen here; may I speak?” Maxine Hansen said.

  “Go ahead, lieutenant,” Mason said.

  “I’m no exobiologist or scientist, but what I’m seeing here is something I’ve read about. Something from ancient Earth history.”

  Haslip turned her suit toward the right and stared at Max. Her gloved hands went to her hips. There was a pregnant pause as the other men on the platform turned to face her as well.

  “What is it, lieutenant?” Haslip said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “This ship, this worm,” Max said evenly, “is a slave ship. We’ve stumbled upon a slaver.”

  * * *

  Doctor Isaacs looked at the mess of bodies on his metal slabs. The corpsmen had been very careful to match upper and lower body parts and once satisfied, they had departed for saner duties. The autopsies, required by naval regulations, were his responsibility.

  These would be pretty easy. Cause of death? Exsanguination. They bled out in a non-explosive but violent manner. Ruptured hearts and main vessels awaited his laser cutter. Distended and ruptured bowels. Bladders with jagged tears. Eyeballs exploded from the pressure of the vitreous liquid within. These human skins were nothing in death that remotely reflected the viable sailors they had been in life. Such was the cruelty of death in vacuum, such was the hardship of life in space; these things were not mutually exclusive.

  As he opened up Lieutenant Volta he spoke into the overhead pickup in a clear but tired voice. He noted what he saw without any editorializing. As he handed off the soft tissue organs and scooped the other identifiable internals to his surgical tech corpsman, he noted the related traumas and descriptions matter-of-factly.

  Still, there was no escaping the fact that these were men, men deserving of a fate better than the one they had received. For the second time in as many days, Isaacs contemplated the frailty of human life and the great unsuccessful efforts humans employed to preserve the same.

  * * *

  Alone in his hammock, Eddie Rich refined his plans. The tiny cubicle he shared with another chief was tight but functional. His bunkmate was down on deck twelve setting firing orders. The big electrics on the Christi had to be fired in a certain sequence to provide the ship with the maximum firepower it needed. It was like the firing order on an old fashioned internal combustion engine. The recoil free, electro-pulse discharges had to be timed for effect. Sloppy timing could be a disaster in a real-time hostile situation. The outboard/inboard/outboard sequence along the flank of the ship was the correct way to fire the weapons and provide windows for the zanith-crystal lasers to finish the job.

  In combat, the scenario was something like this: first the heliospasm torpedoes would fire in advance of the ship actually coming into close contact with an intruder; this was done to effectively blind the enemy in such a way that they had to rely solely on their instruments to continue the engagement. Next a barrage of hull-piercing static grenades would be launched. These grenades were capable of generating millions of KeV’s of static electricity, effectively knocking out any instruments that relied on microchip technology. The big electro-pulse guns would fire next, punching holes in the intruder’s flank and outgassing its life support systems. Some of the weaker ships would be pierced through-and-through by the powerful blasts of energized electrons. The last piece of the arsenal was composed of the lasers. Those bright green torches of focused light could literally rip an opposing ship to shreds in a matter of seconds, cutting a half-meter bore through anything they touched. These blasts were primarily used as drive-killers and shield disrupters so it was no mystery as to why they were deployed first or last.

  Rich had no illusions as to what he had to do. His career was coming to an end, his usefulness giving way to younger, less-experienced rates with none of that old combat fire in their bellies. He wanted to go out with a bang and he continued with his plotting and planning. The only thing left to do was decide on the appropriate time to wash his “baby” and then throw it out with the bathwater.

  Chapter 17

  The trek forward was painstakingly slow. Max Hansen was very careful where she put her feet. The meter-wide catwalk was littered with alien body parts. Following Commander Haslip, some things she stepped over, others she raked over the side with her boot. When the worm shuddered some of the cocoons still attached to the curved bulkheads worked themselves loose and fell to the deck below. Others smashed onto the walkway and popped like overripe melons, spraying still more gore and thin bones. The worst of it, Max decided, was the soft pumping sound from the big tubes over her head. And the fleeting sounds of metal on metal as the big ship adjusted itself. Whatever “air” was present in this chamber of horrors was dense enough to transmit vibrations, sounds, and each time one of those cocoons fell to the littered deck below, she heard the sibilant hiss and puff noises through her helmet as if an unseen ghost was softly whispering into her ears.

  Several meters ahead of her Gena Haslip stopped and looked back. “Got something up here,” she said.

  The two MA sentries joined her first. By the time Max caught up with them, they were already looking at a huge panel on the starboard side of the alien ship, nestled into the corrugated wall and blinking one lone status light of some kind.

  “Look there, sir, looks like a series of hatches,” one of the ratings said.

  Haslip turned ninety degrees and surveyed the chamber. They had made it almost halfway around.

  Max Hansen turned as well and saw the suit lights behind her. Two people were still walking gingerly toward her and, spaced about fifty or sixty meters behind them, other lights played over the interior of the ship.

  “One of you techs get up here, on the double,” Haslip commanded.

  The nearest rating behind Hansen did a quick-step hitch and made his way to the front. When he got near Max she hugged the wall and let him pass, careful not to get hit by the equipment bag he lugged behind him. She looked at his ID patch as he side-stepped past: JOHNS.

  In the hour it had taken them to get to the front of this huge compartment, the back-fill had been significant. Judging from the comm traffic she had monitored, Max estimated there were easily fifty men and women now inside the guts of the worm. A collapsible collar-tube had been attached to the side of the worm at the original point of entry and now there was a treaded walkway between the worm and the lifeboats shuttling back and forth between the worm and the Christi. The boats were bringing over men and equipment at thirty-minute intervals. The path they had taken to get to this point was secured by an assortment of masters-at-arms and marine lance corporals, all carrying deadly electric-pulse weapons. There had been no more casualties but six more of those cutting beams had been found and deactivated.

  “There’s another hatch of some kind a few meters ahead, too, ma’am,” Johns said, his arm pointing up and
to the left. “I would guess that one of these must continue forward; seems right.”

  “Get a scanner up here,” Haslip said. “No more mistakes. You got that?”

  “Loud and clear, sir,” the tech said. The second set of suit lights trudged to the front, this electronics technician being the same one that had pulled Hansen away from the alien cage some hours before. He produced a portable doppler unit from his bag and hit the stud. Olson waved the instrument at the bulkhead and walked a few meters further away. Max could see a small LED screen flashing data on the radar unit as he moved it about.

  “I think this first hatch leads to a maintenance closet. It’s pretty dense back there. I would try to operate that second one,” he said.

  “Find us a way in, Mister Olson,” Haslip said.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he said. Johns stepped past the first hatch and joined Olson. The two techs looked at the bulkhead surrounding the second portal and used a blower to rid the area of dust and accumulated debris. Johns kicked a badly decomposed cocoon off the catwalk and stepped past Olson to the far side of the hatch. “Here it is. Over here,” Johns announced.

  His partner joined him and soon they had the control panel uncovered and dust free. As they had found on the first panel, this one had one pulsing light near the lower right corner and an assortment of raised buttons. Above each control was a line of those strange glyphs. Johns turned and waved for Haslip. She trudged the few meters to where the techs stood and peered at the controls. “This looks different, Mister Olson. All of the other hatches had two round activation plates. This only has places to push on buttons of unknown purpose. Are you comfortable with this? Is this really the control to the hatch or will this panel instigate some kind of death beam to do to us what it did to these things?” she said, waving her arm toward the alien compartment and the carnage below.