Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  As her ribcage gives, as blood rushes up into her throat, Gina’s sight glazes over with gold, until all she can see is the massive seeking eye of the Star.

  Menon.

  “He’s here,” she mumbles, bubbling out red. “He’s here.”

  ***

  He has waited.

  He has been patient.

  He has come.

  He is here.

  These humans, with their puny notions of ships and weapons. They are sacrifices. He deserves them.

  Four of them are all but silent now. The man lets out a gasping whine, struggling for air, but his ribs collapse inward and the noise becomes a rattle that breaks off into quiet.

  He is here. He has come.

  Isobel Sanchez blinks blood from her eyes and, with the last of her breath, begins to laugh.

  Scarlett R. Algee Biography

  Scarlett R. Algee’s work has appeared in (among others) Sanitarium Magazine, The Sirens Call, Body Parts Magazine, and the recent anthologies Zen of the Dead and Lupine Lunes; she was also the copy editor of Explorations: First Contact. She lives in the wilds of Tennessee with a beagle and an uncertain number of cats.

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  Shot in the Dark

  By Richard Fox

  Yoon’s screens blinked as the first returns from the Allihies’ probes came in. Raw data scrolled past and she scowled at the numbers.

  “No way that’s right,” she muttered.

  “XO, you’ve some good news for us, yes?” Captain Nash limped over to her station, his prosthetic leg so stiff it was little better than a peg. He was still pale from the hyper sleep and his eyes carried worry and fear. He’d been this way since the encrypted message came in from Admiral Skarsgaard and he’d sent the Allihies into largely uncharted space.

  “I think we got another batch of crap drones from Shiroyama Corp,” Yoon said. “Because what’s coming back makes no sense at all. Just look.”

  She traced a circle over a screen and flicked the data file onto a holo screen over her station.

  At first glance, it looked like a spiral galaxy with several arms slowly moving around a white haze of stars at the center. Yoon reached into the holo and zoomed in on the outer edge. An angular space ship with a deep red hull rolled over and over in a fog of ice particles and small asteroids.

  “The profile doesn’t match any known alien species,” Yoon said. “The other ships don’t match, either.”

  “Other ships?” Nash asked.

  The holo zoomed out, and lines traced alien craft that looked like snowflakes intersecting in a single point, their symmetry ruined by broken prongs and missing sections. The new ships were spread through the ‘arm’, intermixed with other dark red angular ships.

  “I almost wrote them off as exotic Kuiper belt objects, like they found near Sedna years ago, but the spectrograph readings come back as complex polymers, not ice,” Yoon said. “The red ships are a bit more conventional: armored like the FCF navy…so we’re looking at two alien fleets. The Drerix and the Svarra. Neither of which are on the books, aside from the names.”

  “This anomaly—I don’t know what to call it—that they’re orbiting, what do the sensors have on it?” Nash asked. He swiped his fingers in the holo and centered the image on the middle of the faux galaxy. A chart of data readings popped up next to a tiny black dot in the center.

  “It’s not a black hole,” Yoon said, “but it’s close. Hawking radiation, X-ray levels are insane…we’ve already lost three probes and the rest will fry in less than half an hour. Look at this,” Yoon tapped her screens and pulsing red icons popped up around the alien ships. “Everything reads an ionizing radiation hazard. The amount of rads an unshielded person—or alien—would get…we’re talking death within minutes.”

  “Which is consistent with what we’d expect to see after a battle using micro-singularity munitions,” Nash said. “We’re in the right place.”

  “Right place for what?” Yoon asked.

  The rest of the Allihies bridge crew turned away from their stations and watched as Captain Nash rubbed a hand against the stubble on his face, then put his hands on his hips.

  “Now that we’re here, and there’s no danger of anyone leaking our mission to the enemy, I can share our purpose. Skarsgaard uncovered records of a battle, one tens of thousands of years ago, between two alien empires that possessed weapons tech a hell of a lot more advanced than anything the FCF has. We’re looking at the aftermath,” Nash said. “This is a salvage operation, boys and girls. FCF needs singularity warheads to fend off that bastard Empyrean.”

  “Why the hell didn’t this Skarsgaard mention a high rad environment?” Yoon asked. “The Allihies isn’t equipped for this. I feel like I’m getting a tan just looking at the data.”

  “There’s never been a battle where both sides of a conflict had singularity warheads.” Nash motioned to the anomaly at the center of the spiral. “Both of the races were never heard from again after this fight. Legend is that they found a habitable world further in system, a suitable place for both their races.”

  Yoon looked at another screen.

  “There’s a world a little larger than Earth in the habitable zone, but it’s a bare rock. Might have had an atmosphere once.”

  “That got stripped away in a rad spike from the singularity exchange.” Nash shook his head. “Shame. They destroyed each other and the reason they came here.”

  “Tragedy aside.” Yoon swiped her hand across the holo and a wire diagram of the Allihies replaced the aftermath of the ancient battle. “Our shields are holding, but the rads that mess is emitting will eat through our battery power in twenty-nine hours. Then we start taking dosage and—”

  “I know what happens after that, XO.” Nash put a hand on her shoulder. “We need to find any remaining singularity warheads and get them back to Earth. Launch all the probes, this job doesn’t have an expense sheet to balance. Look for Hawking radiation emitting from the ships.”

  “Aye aye.” Yoon reconfigured the last of their probes sitting in the launch tubes and sent them hurtling into the void. She sat back and watched as the trace from the probes reached toward the vast ship graveyard, thousands of miles in diameter.

  “Skipper,” she said quietly, “if we do find these warheads, they’ll be in a hot zone. None of our drones has the shielding for that kind of environment. Only way we can poke around is if we send in crew wearing titan suits. Those are for reactor emergency maintenance, not salvage. Plus, we’ve only got four of the suits.”

  “I’m aware,” Nash said.

  “And who knows how hot these warheads will be? We bring them on the ship and…”

  “We’ve got lead-lined compartments and we can move shield emitters to negate the dosage. If that’s not enough, the computer can still get the Allihies back to Earth without us.”

  “Sweet Jesus, skipper.” Yoon’s hands clenched into fists. “You’d condemn the whole crew for-for what? A couple silver bullets that might work?”

  “What price should we pay to fight off extinction, Yoon? Empyrean won’t stop at Earth. It’ll burn every colony. Every last man, woman, and child across the stars. We need to give the United Earth Foundation a chance to fight back…no matter the cost.”

  “I know you used to be navy, but this is not what I signed up for,” Yoon said. “Christ, what a mess.”

  An alert popped up on one of her screens.

  “Got a hit. Probably,” she said. “Probe burned out right after it sent the data.”

  A ring appeared around one of the red ships, near the middle of an arm made up of ice and broken ships. The prow extended to twin prongs: one ended in a jagged tip, broken. It lay wedged between the frills of a second ship from the other dead fleet. Lumps of ice packed against the ships’ hulls, welding them together. A white dot wavered over the angular ship middle, where the long vanes met the rest of the hull, and ahead of the collision with the other ship.

  “Got a fluctuatio
n in the Hawking field around this ship,” Yoon said. “There’s something emitting in that ship, which causes ripples in the deeper field from the anomaly.”

  “Then that’s our target. Have engineering send our four titans to the shuttle bay along with three volunteers. You prep umbilicals to pull the whole ship out. We’ll tow the whole thing back to Earth if I can’t get the warheads out in time.”

  “Sorry, you think you’re going in that thing?” Yoon asked. “Your prosthetic leg won’t meld with the titan controls and you know that.”

  “I’ll remove it,” Nash rapped knuckles against his fake thigh. “I can use the analog backups to move around—”

  “With all due respect, skipper, you’re full of it,” Yoon said. “Even in the titans, anyone that goes in that ship will take at least a full dose of radiation within two hours. You go waddling around in there using manuals and you won’t get three hundred meters before your vision starts to go and your guts bubble. No. I’ll go. I’m rated for titans and you’re the man that pulled that old freighter out of Neptune’s upper atmosphere.”

  “You know how bad the radiation is in there,” Nash said.

  “Of course. I’m volunteering mostly because I know if anyone but me goes in there, the Allihies will have to do a full ship recovery. We do that and everyone on board will need a full blood transfusion and bone marrow transplants to keep from glowing in the dark for the rest of their lives. No, thank you.”

  “I knew I should’ve gone for the full transplant.” Nash rapped knuckles against his prosthetic leg. “Get to the shuttle bay, and good luck.”

  ***

  “This is some bullshit.” Crewman Vitali held an injector against his neck and winced as it sent a potassium-iodine mix into his bloodstream. He tossed the injector to Costas, then sat in the hatch on the back of the titan exo-suit.

  “This’ll be a quick in and out.” Yoon adjusted her body suit. The anti-radiation fabric was stiff against her body. That it was designed for protection, and not comfort, would never be far from her mind.

  “Now that’s some bullshit.” Benson caught the injector from Costas and jabbed it against the inside of his bare wrist. “Ship’s been banged up for God knows how long. We don’t know what the xenos even look like. We eat a bunch of rads waiting for the breach to finish and the passageways are made for something three feet tall, and we’ll feel pretty damn stupid.”

  “That ship’s got twice the displacement of the Allihies.” Yoon put on a lead-lined helmet and grabbed a pair of airlines from inside of her titan suit and connected them to leads on the back of her shoulders. The body suit expanded slightly, locked against her helmet, and a puff of air washed over her face. “According to the Daewun Theorem, the occupants should be humanoid and about our size, maybe a bit bigger.”

  “Daewun died over a hundred years ago.” Vitali connected his air lines and gave Yoon a thumbs up. “It ain’t his nutsack that’ll get the rads if he’s wrong. What about the other ship? The snowflake-looking one.”

  “It doesn’t fit any of the models.” Yoon grabbed the top of the open hatch on her titan’s back and swung into the narrow standing cockpit. She slid her arms into the control sleeves and shrugged her shoulders back, bringing the rest of the titan online. The suit’s inner lining pressed against her body, forming a gentle cushion around her.

  Her visor flashed and the suit’s sensor feeds replaced the darkness inside the suit with the other three titans in the shuttle bay with her. Each was plain, eight feet of metal with a rounded top instead of a head, mechanized legs that could lengthen to add several feet of height to the titan, and thick armored shoulders and arms.

  Yoon raised her right arm and the suit mirrored the gesture. She flexed her fingers against the controls, and the suit’s hand split open as a cutting torch shot out of the wrist housing. She cycled through each of the suit’s tools, then craned her neck to one side, testing the suit’s cameras as they fed a 360-degree view to her visor.

  “I’m green across the board,” she said.

  “My pneumatics are catching,” Vitali said. “Shouldn’t be an issue once we get moving. This suit’s always needed time to warm up.”

  “You do your regular maintenance and your suit won’t catch,” Costas said. “Instead you catch up on your rack time when the chief engineer sends us down to the core to work on the girls.”

  “How about you not drop a dime when the XO’s here, eh?” Vitali said. “I’ve been in this bucket for years. She’ll be fine.”

  A rumble passed through the shuttle, strong enough that Yoon could feel the effects through her titan’s shock absorbers.

  “We’re breaking,” Benson said. “Who wants to pop the can?”

  “I’ll do it,” Vitali said. “You two ninnies think you’re damn surgeons. This needs a wrecker mentality.”

  “Not once we’re inside,” Yoon said. “I cannot stress enough that the singularity warheads are to be handled delicately.”

  “Oh.” Vitali held up an arm and the fist spun around. “Thought we could just kick them down the hall like a soccer ball.”

  “Cut the shit, Vitali,” Benson said. “This ain’t some salvage run off Proxima Centari. This is real deal first contact. Act like a professional.”

  “Thought we had the FCF for saying ‘hi, please don’t eat me’ to new aliens,” Vitali said. “I’m a working stiff. Shouldn’t be any aliens in here, right, XO?”

  “Not unless they evolved to survive off of levels of radiation fatal to every other living thing we’ve ever come across in the galaxy,” Yoon said. “Thousands of years of high-dose radiation after a cataclysmic battle that wiped out all life in this star system…doubt the FCF would come out here looking for friends and allies.”

  “Position locked over target location,” the shuttle’s computer said to them all. “Signal connection to Allihies good. Slave control active.”

  “Send to Captain Nash that we’ll begin extraction operation in…three minutes. Begin mission clock,” Yoon said.

  “Affirmative,” the shuttle said.

  “How long we got in there?” Benson asked. “The titans are rad-hardened to a point. Tooling around a reactor breach is one thing, walking through the slough of a micro-singularity is something else entirely.”

  “We can take thirty minutes of exposure, about three rads. Any more than that and the ship’s medbay probably won’t be able to save us.” Yoon swallowed hard.

  “‘About’ and ‘probably’, XO?” Vitali asked. “I know there’s a war on or something, but I’d rather not die by melting from the inside out.”

  “Then we better make this a rush job. Minimal exposure, minimal dosage. This is rad survival 101,” Yoon said.

  Warning lights over the shuttle bay door flashed amber.

  “Shields up,” Yoon activated an energy barrier over her titan’s shell and a battery meter popped up on her HUD. It offered a few minutes of protection under the best of circumstances and every second would be precious.

  “Breaking umbilicals.” Vitali stepped away from the power cables attached to his suit’s lower legs and stomped toward the closed ramp. “Hours and hours of power. This rust bucket will last a lot longer than I will. Wheeeee.”

  The warning lights went red and the ramp cracked open. Air whooshed out of the cargo bay as it lowered quickly, the whine of the servos fading away as the atmosphere bled away to nothing.

  A swath of ice and dead starships cut across the void just beyond their shuttle. Tiny flecks of ice swirled into the cargo bay and a yellow tint filled her compartment as radiation suffused the bay.

  “Holy…never seen X-rays this thick before,” Costas said.

  “I know the shields are up,” Benson said, “but I swear my balls are the size of raisins right now.”

  “They doubled in size?” Yoon asked.

  The rest of the team chuckled as Vitali moved towards the edge, his titan’s legs so short he almost waddled. Vitali jumped off the edge and tiny thrus
ters on his back showed him down.

  Yoon flexed her legs and her suit lurched forward. She veered to one side before the old muscle memory came back and she straightened her gait.

  “You OK?” Benson asked her.

  “Like riding a bike. A five-ton rad-hardened bike that Captain Nash bought on consignment from some conglomerate going through bankruptcy,” Yoon said as she walked to the edge of the ramp. Her shields flared as a micro-asteroid pinged off her titan’s chest.

  “In the navy we always bitched about the lowest bidder,” Costas said. “Civvie side, we’ve got to worry about cheap shit the skipper buys to keep the underwriters happy.”

  Yoon leaned slightly over the edge and peered down. The alien ship spread out beneath them, a few dozen yards down. Snow and ice packed into the edges of the hull plating, the remnants of some comet ripped apart when it came too close to the anomaly. A crystal spire stretched up and away from the metal hull, cracks running along the length, like a castle of glass buckling under attack.

  Vitali was locked against the hull, clamps on his feet screwed into the surface. A plumb incorporated into his legs thumped against the red metal several times, a radar ping hitting Yoon’s sensors.

  “Got a void beneath the hull here,” Vitali said. “Thank God for small favors. Activating plasma torch.”

  “Cut true,” Yoon said, giving an old spacer’s blessing.

  “You gonna know what we’re looking for when you see it?” Costas asked.

  “From what the captain got from Skarsgaard—and what the ship’s AI can deduce from the vessel’s shape—the warheads should be the size of a soccer ball. Fits with the size of the forward magnetic acceleration rails. Magazine should be at the base of the rails.”

  “There’s that ‘should’ again,” Benson said. “There’s a radiation source coming from where the ship thinks that magazine is. Think they had a spill? Think maybe there aren’t any bullets left?”

  “Hard to tell at what point of the battle shit went sideways,” Costas said. “First salvo make the anomaly that fried both fleets? Last? We find an empty room and I’m going to feel like an asshole.”