On The Run: Spider Wars: Book 2

by Randy Dyess

“More riffraff. We have plenty to take their place in the mines when this is over—don’t waste any time with a warning or trying to save them. Get your men in place and ready to capture the beasts. If the pattern holds, you have a month before the next attack.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll make the arrangements,” Agent Smith said. “What about the fifty million left on Candus? What do you want to do with them?”

  “Quarantine the planet. Tell everyone it was an outbreak of some deadly disease, and scatter probes in the system to track anyone coming or going. I want all transmissions in or out to be stopped—a complete blackout on these attacks. I don’t want anyone asking questions about Candus. We need to keep these attacks away from the media—no use in having core planet citizens panic needlessly. The attacks are a long way off—trillions of riffraff live between us and the spiders.”

  “How about the owners of the planet? What will I tell them and the people on Candus who don’t see any signs of a disease outbreak?”

  “I’ll handle Henry Candus and his group, but I don’t care about the others. Tell them we have evacuated everyone else and they should make their way to Candus City for evacuations. There should be enough supplies there for years. They grow their own food, so that shouldn’t be a problem, either.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and the spiders will attack again and take care of our problem. If they don’t attack, just let that riffraff figure out how to survive on their own. If you have to, let loose a plague of your own. When this is all over, we’ll turn the planet back over to Candus Corporation and they can clean up the mess.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Anything else?” Senator Williams asked.

  “Based on our agent’s report, we think old-fashioned kinetic weapons would work against the spiders. I’m having the team we’re sending to Chaovis try out a few designs we created from ancient schematics. If we cannot figure out how to get modern weapons to work, we can start arming our troops with the old style.”

  “Whatever works is fine with me. If they do work, though, see me first. I think I know of a manufacturer who can get a production line up and operational quickly.”

  Probably one you own, Agent Smith thought. “Yes, sir. One other detail: our agent spotted a ship in orbit around Candus. We don’t have a good identification, yet, but we think it was a new security vessel created by an outer-rim shipping company called Sullivan Shipping. The vessel name is Sullivan’s Pride.”

  “Have your agent track that ship and report immediately if it lands on the planet,” Senator Williams commanded, furious at the news. "I want another report in twelve hours! I want to know what this ship did while they were in orbit and if they landed. Tell my assistant to come in on your way out."

  “Yes, sir,” Agent Smith responded before turning and walking out of the office. A few seconds later, Senator Williams’ over-worked assistant ran in.

  “What took you so long?” he shouted. “Never mind, keep your lame excuses to yourself. I want you to arrange a Senate Security Committee meeting for tonight. Get everyone here, no excuses.”

  “Yes, sir. Right away sir,” the poor girl said as she ran back out of the office.

  *****

  Captain Moore looked around the Castle’s mess hall. A room built to hold twenty-five now only held eight other crewmembers, besides himself. He sighed when he realized there should have been at least two more officers. In their place sat two chief petty officers.

  "Okay, people," he started off. "I know things are bad and we’ve lost people, but I need to have a status from each of you if we are going to get this ship put back together enough to live through this.”

  Captain Moore looked at the youngest member present. "Jerry, where is Lt. Anderson?” he asked, hoping the man was busy in engineering and had sent Jerry in his place.

  "He didn't make it, sir,” young Chief Petty Officer Martinez replied. “The last quarter of the ship is missing and he was in the engine room when it happened. As far as I know, I'm the only engineer left."

  “Missing?” responded Captain Moore, thinking he’d misunderstood what the young man said.

  “Yes, sir. The drive compartments didn't make it through the tunnel. I think the plasma weapon hit us and melted part of the ship before we fully entered the FTL endpoint. I also think it dissipated in the tunnel, which is probably the reason we’re still alive.”

  “Explain.”

  “Sir, if another layer of compartments had been melted, we would have lost all power generation abilities, battery backups, environmental, and a critical part of the main beam. I think we would have broken up during transit if the damage went any further up the ship. It stopped short of one of our main beams.”

  “How many others in your section are left?”

  “None, sir. Besides Lt. Anderson, we’ve lost the rest of the engineering section. They were all in the compartments that were melted or breached. I only survived, because I was in the forward hold, finding a replacement part,” CPO Martinez said before stopping and looking down at his feet. “I should have been with them—”

  “You can’t blame yourself for what happened—none of us can. We lost people and there was nothing any one of us could do,” Captain Moore interrupted. He looked at the rest of the men and women sitting in the mess hall. “We have to stress this to everyone. There was nothing we could have done, and we were lucky the Castle was as close to our endpoint as we were, or we wouldn’t have made it. We’ve lost people, but we’ll have to mourn later. We need to save everyone still alive. Understood?”

  “Aye, Captain,” a weak response sounded out.

  “Sir, about the others,” Lt. Santiago said. “We have at least fifteen injured crewmembers trapped behind the airtight seals. We can’t get to them.”

  “I have a plan for that,” CPO Martinez replied. “If I can get into the switch compartment, I can reroute the power supply to those doors one at a time. This will let us open the doors and retrieve the injured without draining the batteries.”

  “Okay, let me hear how bad it is,” Captain Moore said. He listened to the remaining crewmembers report what they knew. Twelve were missing and presumed to be dead. Six more were known to be dead. Twenty-seven crew members were injured, including himself and Lt. Jones, and five of those had serious injuries that would be fatal if they couldn’t get equipment from medical, which was currently behind a damaged door.

  The rest of the news was just as bad. A quarter of the ship was missing and ten compartments were breached and opened to space. Another fifteen compartments they didn’t know the status of were behind the damaged airtight seals, and all drives were gone. The good news was the power generators appeared to be undamaged but were currently offline. Unfortunately, they were in one of the breached compartments and no one could get to them. Oxygen levels were stable, but they could only generate a limited amount of oxygen from the carbon dioxide scrubbers. The ship was on emergency batteries, but they would be drained in another six hours.

  "Sir," CPO Martinez said, "if I can go outside the ship, I can make it to the generator room and get them back up and running."

  "How are you going to do that," Lt. Morris asked, "without using a lot of our oxygen while cycling through the airlocks?"

  "We have an emergency repair suit, and I think I can manually eject one of the remaining survival pods. I can then use the pod injection tunnel as a miniature airlock."

  “Jerry,” Captain Moore said, “get to it. Do the best you can with what you have. Andres, go with him and grab any crew member you may need."

  "Aye, Captain," Lt. Santiago replied before looking at CPO Martinez and nodding. “Let’s go and save who we can.”

  The two men left the mess hall with all eyes on them, wishing them the best of luck. Everyone in the room still had a friend or two behind the damaged airtight seals.

  “Bill, go with them. Make sure you work on the med door first.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Sara, what's the status o
f communications?” Captain Moore asked.

  “I think I can get internal systems back up and operational with a little more power, but nothing I'd do will have any effect on external communications. The comm arrays were in the part of the ship that was destroyed.

  “Is there any way around that?”

  “I think I can rig up a system using the remaining defensive lasers. If I can reconfigure it to sweep for a comm relay signal and create a connection, we might be able to have limited external communications. We won't be able to talk to a ship directly if one is here, but we can have the comm relay give them coordinates, so we can create a point-to-point laser connection between us. That is if there’s a comm relay in this system,” Lt. Jones responded.

  “I think there should be,” Captain Moore replied. “I’ve done some calculations based on the time we were in transit, and I think we may have only gone one or two light years before we exited. We should be in the Redrars system, and if we are, we got lucky.”

  “How’s that?” Lt. Johnson asked.

  “Redrars is uninhabited,” Captain Moore replied, “but it is used as a transfer point between local and long-distance ore freighters. There should be multiple comm relays in the system, and if there’s not one already, a freighter should be coming here soon. If we can stay alive and get some communications back up, we might have a chance.”

  “Sara, reconfigure the laser and let me know when you're done,” Captain Moore said. He then looked toward the small group remaining in the mess hall. “Good work, people. I know most of us have lost friends, but we need to get the ship up and functioning as much as possible if we are going to survive. Now, get back to work and give me back my ship!” Captain Moore commanded.

  Chapter 2

  Agent Smith came rushing back into Senator Williams’ office, not stopping to admire the view this time. “We just had word from our agent. The ship he saw has landed on Candus.”

  “What’s going on?” Senator Williams demanded.

  “A Sullivan Shipping security vessel, the Sullivan’s Pride, came into orbit as the spider fleet was finishing its attack. They scanned the fleet and planet and sent data back to us and their own headquarters. Others already know about the attack.”

  “Is this the ship you were telling me about?”

  “Yes, sir. The Sullivan’s Pride claimed they had systems failure and declared an emergency. Our agent told us the survivors were heading toward the spaceport, and the Sullivan’s Pride landed there. It’s possible they met up with the survivors and learned about the spiders.”

  “Damn it! I told you to keep this under wraps. Get online to Candus Corporation and have them burn those transmissions. What about this other company, Sullivan Shipping? I’ve never heard of them before. Who are they?”

  “They’re a small, private shipping firm operating out of Pegasus Prime. They mostly run routes between inner-rim and outer-rim planets. Since there is a lot of pirate activity in those sectors, they’ve used a clause from the Tarquin Accords and built their own security vessels. They have at least four that we know of and there may be others. Our information is slim on corporations operating solely out of rim sectors, including this one, but I’ve forwarded everything I have to your assistant.”

  “Send a group of vessels to Pegasus Prime and blow their ship apart. Make it look like a pirate attack.”

  “We can’t. The—”

  “What the hell do you mean you can’t?” Senator Williams gave Agent Smith a cold look to tell him he stepped over a line.

  “The ship is heavily armed. It’s their new flagship and after looking at the schematics, we don’t think the Titan could even survive an attack on it.”

  “Don’t you think those schematics are exaggerated a little? I doubt any rim world shipping company could build something powerful enough to take on any Terran Navy ship. The Titan is the best we have. How could a piss-ant outer-rim shipping company have ships better than the Terran Navy?”

  “They deal with more pirate attacks than the navy does. They also want to expand their operations to areas known for pirates. Shipping has slowed down in the outer rims, and we believe the Sullivans want to expand the scope of their company. We picked up an application they filed to start shipping in the Nembus, Phad, Polarius, and Regulus sectors. They also filed applications to start mining planets and moons beyond the Terreca and Pegasus sectors. We think they are building this new class of security vessels in anticipation of being awarded those contracts.”

  “Ambitious little company, aren’t they? Continue to arrange to destroy the ship. If that fails, then we’ll buy them off. I’ll take up the matter with the security committee about awarding them their contracts to keep them silent. Give them a bunch of routes and mining claims in sectors that the spiders will attack. It shuts them up without costing us anything.”

  “I’ll let you be the judge of that,” Agent Smith said. “There is another problem.”

  “What now?”

  “One of the Sullivan family, Robert Sullivan, is an ex-senate intelligence agent. He was an alpha red.”

  “An alpha red, huh?” Senate intelligence alpha red agents were the best the agency had to offer. They had the training and skills necessary to exterminate entire family lines or arrange for mega-corporations to become bankrupted and go out of business. “What was his specialty?”

  “He used to infiltrate pirate and terrorist bases and assassinate their leadership. Based on his records, he is not someone to take lightly.”

  “Send me his files. Make sure the attack on that ship cannot be traced back to us—I don’t want one of those alpha red agents looking for me, even if they are retired. In fact, spin up another alpha red, in case we need to get rid of this ex-agent.”

  “Yes, sir,” Agent Smith replied, shaking inside at the thought of someone like Robert Sullivan coming after him. Most alpha red agents were good at bringing down corporations and families from a distance, but Robert Sullivan crawled into the homes of pirate captains and terrorist leaders and slit their throats as they slept, leaving them to be found the next morning by their family.

  “Get me those spiders and a ship, if possible. We need to figure out how to keep these raids limited to outer-rim planets. I don’t care if we have to give them people as bribes to keep them away from major planets—there is enough riffraff in this galaxy to keep a buffer between us and the spiders for decades. Dismissed.”

  “Yes, sir.” Agent Smith turned around and started walking toward the door.

  “Agent Smith.”

  He turned back and faced his boss. “Yes, sir?”

  “Take care of that Michael Lee character and find some outer-rim hole to drop that Sergeant Major into. I don’t want them sharing the information they figured out on Candus. In fact, transfer the Sergeant Major to the marine base on Shaserus. Let’s see if he can survive a second spider attack,” Senator Williams said.

  “Yes, sir.” This arrogant moron has just written off a trillion or more people like they were ants. Billions have already been taken, and nothing from this egomaniac or his security committee. Maybe I don’t want to be a senator, after all.

  Senator Williams watched Agent Smith walk out his door before calling out to his personal assistant. “Move up the senate security committee to tonight—and get me all the information you can about some outer-rim company called Sullivan Shipping. I want to know everything about them before the meeting.”

  *****

  For the past seven hours, the remaining crew of the Castle had worked tirelessly to get the ship’s critical systems back up and running. CPO Martinez successfully exited the ship through his makeshift airlock and repaired most of the damaged airtight seals and generators. Lt. Morris and Lt. Santiago worked with the remaining crewmembers and rescued those trapped behind the sealed doors.

  Martinez had not been able to get the medical compartment airtight seal open, but he’d gone into the compartment, gathered all the medical supplies he could carry, and pas
sed them through the makeshift airlock. Three trips later, he had transferred enough medical supplies to allow the other crewmembers to treat the injured, including those with serious injuries. No one else would die. Captain Moore told Martinez his actions had probably saved the lives of at least twelve of his fellow crewmembers.

  “Captain,” CPO Martinez reported through the newly repaired internal communication system, “I'm about to switch on generator number one. We should have partial power in a few minutes.”

  The bridge crew stood with fingers crossed, hoping the young engineer would be successful. A small cheer went up throughout the ship as the lights stopped flickering and power started flowing through the ship. Several sparks filled various compartments as damaged power lines received power, but the crew rushed to shut them down before they could damage circuits or start fires.

  “Jerry,” Captain Moore said, “I know we need more power than generator one can give us, but make heating a priority for the next few minutes.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Martinez replied. When the ship lost power, the heating system had gone off and the temperature had fallen to below freezing. The crewmembers were wrapped in every blanket and towel they’d been able to find to stave off the cold. Another few hours and the temperature would have fallen low enough for the crew to fall victim to hypothermia.

  “What about gravity? It would be helpful if we had gravity up and running,” Lt. Morris asked.

  “Not yet, Bill. We don't have enough power from one generator for that,” Captain Moore responded.

  “Aye, Captain.” Lt. Morris was prone to motion sickness; floating around had taxed his willpower. He was becoming nauseous, and the medicine he needed was still in the medical compartment. He wasn’t about to ask Martinez to retrieve motion sickness pills for him, however, when so many crewmembers had serious or critical injuries.

  “Lt. Jones, what about my external comms?”

  “With the increased power, I’m able to increase the range and rate of the scanning. We’re looking for any signal in the system now. It may take a few more hours, but I'll keep it up until we find something.”